OhmyNews and Its Citizen Journalists




OhmyNews and Its Citizen Journalists

as Avatars of a Post-Modern Marketplace of Ideas



A.J. Liebling once said, ‘Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.’ Now, millions do.”

– Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman











Ronald R. Rodgers

Assistant Professor
Department of Journalism
The University of Florida

PO Box 118400

Gainesville, FL 32611-8400


Office: 352/392-8847

Fax: 352/846-2673


rrodgers@jou.ufl.edu






Paper in press at Journal of Global Mass Communication








OhmyNews’ and Its Citizen Journalists

as Avatars of a Post-Modern Marketplace of Ideas



Abstract


This analysis of a successful online citizen-journalism news site in South Korea conjoins the autocracy of the past with the first traces of a participatory democracy less than two decades later to illustrate the possibilities inherent to the digitally mediated communications. This study shows that in those dark times for a democratic movement we can also draw enlightenment about the contrapuntal relationship between communication and democracy in a marketplace of ideas unshackled and freed from governmental or corporate interests.





Key Words: online, democracy, citizen-journalism



OhmyNews and Its Citizen Journalists

as Avatars of a Post-Modern Marketplace of Ideas



Introduction


In the months after the assassination of South Korean dictator Park Chun Hee in October 1979, this author was working at the Korea Herald, an English-language daily in downtown Seoul with a circulation of around 80,000 both in country and around the world. It was a time of upheaval – an interregnum in which many democratic-minded citizens saw both the first intimations of a democracy obscured by the insinuation of the military’s planned takeover of the government. At the height of these conflicting vectors, the more democratic-minded students took to the streets in protest for democracy. Each day, on the streets below the newspaper’s third-floor office windows thousands of university students would march toward the city center where they would meet thousands of others pouring in from other universities around Seoul. Waiting them there was the capital building, the Seoul city hall, and the U.S. Embassy ringed by thousands of uniformed troops replete in full riot gear and backed by riot-control vehicles. More than once the paper’s reporters and photographers returned bloodied and bandaged from covering the protests.

It was a given among those that discussed such things that to succeed, the students could not stand alone, but had to persuade the South Korean middle-class – office workers and shopkeepers alike – to join the movement. Such a swelling of the ranks of protest would undoubtedly fracture the underpinnings of the military’s support, it was agreed. Already, in May of 1980, an instance of such a coming together of societal forces had occurred in Kwangju, South Korea’s fifth-largest city and a southwest provincial capital this author had just moved from a few months before. In a ten-day struggle from May 18 to May 27 1980, which began as a student protest and then escalated into “an armed civilian struggle” (Shin, 2003, p. xi), students and shopkeepers alike battled and overwhelmed the police, taking over the city until – in a Tiananmen-like scenario – army troops moved in, opened fire, and massacred hundreds (Shin; Shin & Hwang, 2003).

The military understood well the fault lines on which its power rested. It understood, too, that to ensure the continuance of that power, to convince the citizenry the nation needed it in power, the military needed to control the messages that formed public opinion – in this case that the rioters were instigated by outside influences, read radicals and communists, and that the military was protecting the nation from those outliers. And as crude as they were, the military’s efforts to do so worked. For example, incoming foreign-language news magazines bound for subscribers or for sale at kiosks all over the country were individually clipped of offending stories before they were distributed. Television and radio news broadcast were strictly controlled as to the information they were allowed to air. And the nation’s newspapers were censored heavily (Seoul papers, 1980; Stokes, 1980, August 29; Stokes, 1980, September 4).

In fact, it was perplexing why those bloodied reporters and photographers at the Herald even bothered. Little of what they reported or photographed made it into the paper unless it was rewritten to conform to the military’s message. The same was true of the reams of stories pouring from the news wire machines each day. Indeed, when one would turn from looking down at the students marching toward the city center, there at the managing editor’s desk was a long metal spike piled high with wire reports about protests and riots around the country. None of that information, unless it tended to favor the military, ever made it into the paper. And each day, to ensure no subterfuge by editors trying to slip something into the paper, before the plate-making process the pasted-up pages were taken to the basement of Seoul City Hall where members of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency would pore over the pages and demand that offending stories be removed.

The Marketplace of Ideas

Ultimately, the military in South Korea succeeded and the “rule of the generals” lasted for several years. The task this paper attempts then is to conjoin that autocracy with the first traces of a participatory democracy and a free-rein marketplace of ideas less than two decades later in order to illustrate the possibilities inherent in digitally mediated communications. This paper will show that in those dark times for a democratic movement we can also see something of the contrapuntal relationship between communication and democracy in a marketplace of ideas little hindered by governmental or corporate interests. To do so, this paper compares what occurred during the authoritarianism of two decades ago with the nurturing of a civil society and the growth of a grass-roots democratic movement two decades later partly through the aegis of an unrestrained and a nearly uncontrollable electronic media – most pointedly an online phalanx of citizen journalists. Indeed, it could be argued that South Korea is a kind of laboratory for studying the links between communication and democracy – or at least a grass-roots activism for change and confrontation with hegemonic forces – and the harbinger of possible futures in other nations as the technology of broadband technology sweeps across them.

To that point, this paper will explore the efforts of a successful online citizen-journalism news site in South Korea known as OhMyNews. This study is interested not in a detailed content analysis of the site, but the stance it takes as a purveyor of a new, inclusive model of journalism. To do so, this paper looks at the news site and interviews with readers, commentators, and the founder of the site whose rhetorical stance is often one of legitimizing an outlier journalistic force confronting the traditional media. Much of this literature deals with questions of effect, innovation, reaction, agency, journalistic norms, and legitimacy. However, little of this literature fully explores the predictive possibilities of digitally mediated communications regarding citizen journalism as entrée to revivifying civil society and democracy. That is what this paper attempts to do. It examines the potentialities and implications of a virtual discursive space – in this case a successful, non-exclusionary citizen-journalism news site – and its ability to create a “counter-power” (Castells, p. 249) to power. And, in being about one subject, this paper is also about another. That is: Seeing value in a citizen-journalist media model that creates a civic space for discourse and promotes civic engagement inevitably requires us to question the legitimacy of well-anchored journalistic norms.

One theory that this paper will use and critique is the marketplace of ideas metaphor as ground for civil society and democracy. Here, however, it should be noted that we are not talking about the maligned concept of a marketplace of ideas leading to objective truth, which is unverifiable. Instead, what is meant is the inclusionary notion of the people – the demos – circumventing layers of intermediaries and participating in the decision-making process regarding policies that affect their lives. This is a notion often attributed to John Stuart Mill and then refined further by the mid-20th-century philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn, who said successful self-government requires “that unwise ideas must have a hearing as well as wise ones” (1948, p. 15). And as the media regulation scholar Philip Napoli has noted, in discussions about the marketplace of ideas metaphor:

The key is to recognize that less lofty and more pragmatic goals other than the attainment of truth have historically been associated with the marketplace of ideas concept. Specifically, in moving from the ideal types of policymaking, a vigorous marketplace of ideas has been considered valuable as long as it contributes to (among other things) improved citizen decision making, and hence, more effective representation. (2003, p. 100)

Napoli goes on to dissect the functional elements of a marketplace of ideas. Among these are: The Advancement of Knowledge/Discovery of Truth Function, which is rooted in the “marketplace of ideas” proposition that argues that freely and openly exchanging ideas ratchets up the knowledge of citizens, and the more knowledgeable they are, the wiser their decisions whether as individuals or as a collective; the Enhancing the Democratic Process Function, which argues that freedom of speech’s foremost value is as it relates to improving and augmenting the democratic function; the Community Stability Function, which argues that if free discussion is prevented, then the ability of citizens to make rational judgments is limited to the same degree, and that this ultimately leads to an inflexible society unable to adjust to a changing world or develop new ideas; and the Checking Governmental Power Function, which argues that the core value of free speech is to preclude misconduct by the government (p. 31-61).

Legal scholar Vincent Blasi is a well-known proponent of this media watchdog role – he calls it the “checking value.” He argues that within the overlapping ambits between what is public and what is private, public officials’ right to privacy – and thus withholding information from the marketplace of ideas – must shrink. That’s because while powerful private interests are held in check by the government, there is no corresponding check on what government does. Therefore, Blasi says, “the exercise of power by public officials needs to be more intensively scrutinized and publicized than the activities of those who hold even vast accumulations of private power” (1977, p.54). Simply put, Blasi’s proposition is that systematic scrutiny and exposure of the activities of public officials through an unfettered marketplace of ideas will produce more good in the form of prevention or containment of official misbehavior than harm of various sorts such as diminution in the efficiency of public service or weakening of the trust that ultimately holds any political society together.

In this context, Napoli also argues that in relation to communication regulation as regards the free flow and reception of information, the concept of “network externality” (pp. 42-43) is important – especially in making predictions about the future effects on governance through improvements in technology. Succinctly, in relation to the marketplace of ideas metaphor, the concept implies that the more people who take advantage of the free flow and reception of information, the greater the value of those freedoms.

To that point, Andrew L. Shapiro notes in The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World, the more people involved in a communicative network the better that is for promoting democratic ideals. And one of the key elements to creating a large, efficient communicative network is widespread adoption of broadband – a larger conduit than the dial-up telephone lines that have difficulty handling the quick access to such information as video images. “Fortunately,” Shapiro notes, “there is good reason to believe that broadband networks, which are now in their infancy, will soon be standard” (1999, p. 17).

Indeed, Shapiro’s belief back in 1999 has proven true. For example, June 2007 statistics from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reveal a 24% increase in broadband subscribers in the OECD from 178 million in June 2006 to 221 million in June 2007, which lifted the broadband penetration rate from 15.1 subscribers per 100 people in June 2006 to 18.8 a year later. And leading the OECD in broadband penetration were Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and South Korea, with over 29 subscribers per 100 inhabitants (OECD, 2007, June).

In his lengthy study of the sociology of the information age, Castells (2004) identifies what he calls “networking,” especially Internet-based networking as both a tool to organize activist movements and as “a new form of social interaction” (2004, p 156), and Ayres (1999) observes that “it offers a diverse menu of options to those seeking new channels for protest” (p. 137). To be sure, however, Kahn & Kellner (2004) add, the Internet as a tool of social movements is not solely reserved to the left, but “is a contested terrain, used by Left, Right, and Center of both dominant cultures and subcultures in order to promote their own agendas and interests” (p. 94).

Castells (2004) describes the Zapatistas as “the first informational guerrillas” (p. 156), a view posited by other scholars. For example, Froehling (1997) portrays the formation of an international community of supporters during the 1994 uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, through the use of the Internet as one of the first examples of how digitally media communications could be used to elicit social activism. And, he notes the anti-globalization protests in Seattle during the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference in 1999 created a “network of networks” (p. 154) through the aegis of the Internet that helped activists coordinate their actions and mobilize. Indeed, many other examples abound, to include activists in both Estonia and Russia who worked together with e-mail to fight the degradation of a shared lake (O’Lear, 1996, 1997); the Japan’s Ainu minority’s use of the Internet to publicize the threats posed by a dam under construction and Okinawans using it to protest U.S. military bases (Rimmer & Morris-Suzuki, 1999); student protestors reporting to the world in 1998 over the Internet while they occupied the national Parliament compound during the dissipation of President Suharto’s rule (Hill, 2002); in Egypt, despite the best efforts of a repressive regime, bloggers have established an alternative media and a vehicle of free expression of subjects ranging from religious and social minorities to police brutality – stories rarely covered in the mainstream media (Shahine, 2007); and in Fiji after the armed seizure of government in December 2006 and the censorship of the mainstream media, blogs arose in the aftermath and became a venue for the free expression of ideas (Foster, 2007). Another more recent example comes from Cuba, where a clandestine network of young people are using computer memory sticks, digital cameras and hidden connections to the Internet to broadcast news suppressed by the official state media. The Cuban government has long banned Internet connections and would tear down satellite receivers if found. Still, the underground network has acted as a “telegraph service” (McKinley, 2008, para. 8).

The Internet and the Problems of the Public Sphere

Certainly, such evidence not withstanding, some scholars temper the view that the Internet offers a facile conduit to democratization and the transformation of existing political orders. For example, Abbot (2001) asserts that while it can act as a marketplace for the free exchange of ideas, its impact is diminished by two factors – commercialization and the existing digital gap between North and South and within countries between such issues as gender, education, and wealth. Indeed, as Tolbert and Mossberger (2006) note, in the U.S. alone, those segments of the population less likely to have access to broadband at home include the poor, less educated, Latinos and African Americans, women, rural residents and those less exposed to the Internet at work.

Still, while Warf and Grimes (1997) argue that although the existence of the Internet does not ensure “counterhegemonic discourses” will emerge, “it does facilitate the opening of discursive spaces within which they may be formulated and conveyed” (p. 270). But, Papacharissi (2004) cautions, while inclusion is a constituent of democracy and though digitally mediated communication has its advantages, it does “not instantaneously guarantee a fair, representative and egalitarian public sphere" (p. 383). In addition, "greater participation in political discussion is not the sole determinant of democracy. The content, diversity and impact of political discussion need to be considered carefully before we conclude whether online discussion enhances democracy" (p. 386).

A precursor to our current notion of the public sphere, Benhabib (1995) asserts, were the late eighteenth-century salons in Berlin begun by Jewish women in which “the individual desire for difference and distinctness could assume an intersubjective reality” that allowed for “a ‘space’ of visibility and self-expression” (17). Benhabib goes on to note, however, that given their gender and cultural limitations, the salons are certainly not a template for a contemporary public sphere. Still, they tell us “that whatever revival of the public sphere is possible under conditions of complex and differentiated societies will take place not only in the sphere of the political but in the domain of civic and associational society as well.” That is, they are “past carriers of some of its future potentials” (pp. 23-24).

Indeed, in considering any successful online citizen-journalism site as a potential non-exclusionary public sphere, caution should be taken. That is because the constraints that damper the flow of ideas and make democracy the struggle it is arise out of the differences in our very diversity. The philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich (1960) distills this conflict in his assertion that justice is the “acknowledgement of the other person as a person” (p. 80) and that: “Every encounter, whether friendly or hostile, whether benevolent or indifferent, is in some way, unconsciously or consciously, a struggle of power with power,” which is the price “paid for the creativity of life” (p. 87).

To that point, Benhabib's view that "free and unconstrained dialogue" must be the "principle of democratic legitimacy for all modern societies" (1992, p. 88) is particularly relevant here. Benhabib (2002) argues in The Claims of Culture that differences within a culture are part of an ongoing negotiated give and take where the “The ‘other’ is always also within us and is one of us” (p. 8). “I argue that the task of democratic equality is to create impartial institutions in the public sphere and civil society where this struggle for the recognition of cultural differences and the contestation for cultural narratives can take place without domination” (p. 8).

Still, Benhabib (1992) has criticized public spheres as too exclusionary. She argues that “public dialogue means challenging and redefining the collective good and one’s sense of justice as a result of the public foray” (p. 84). Benhabib argues that Habermas’s “discourse mode of public space” is to be admired for its “radical indeterminacy and openness” (p. 84). Indeed, she insists, Habermas’s discourse model “is the only one that is compatible both with the general social trends of our societies and with the emancipatory aspirations of new social movements, like the woman’s movement” (p. 95).

Still, Mouffe (2000) rejects the inclination to believe that out of such discourse and deliberation comes democratic consensus. She argues, instead, that democratic politics is at its heart a tension between two historical traditions – the rule of law and popular sovereignty – what Brewin describes as “the competing demand on the body politic for both unity and difference” (2006, p. 37). Therefore, Mouffe asserts in the The Democratic Paradox that democratic politics should be seen as “an ‘agonistic confrontation’ between conflicting interpretations of the constitutive liberal-democratic values. In such a confrontation the left/right configuration plays a crucial role and the illusion that democratic politics could organize itself without them can only have disastrous consequences” (p. 9). It is an illusion, she adds, that “a rational consensus” could reconcile this tension (p. 11).

The debate, then, remains unsettled between those who adhere to the notion of democracy as a deliberative, procedural consensus and those that hold that democracy is the result of an unceasing agonistic contestation among stakeholders, (Benhabib, 1996; Mouffe, 1996). Still, the concept of a digitally meditated marketplace of ideas such as OhMyNews applies in either case. In the former, if we concur with Benhabib (1996) that the notion of a “public sphere” is key to the “deliberative model of democracy” (p.80), then such sites expand the arena of debate and discourse in which an “anonymous ‘public conversation’ ” takes place through “the interlocking net of these multiple forms of associations, networks, and organizations” (Benhabib, 1996, pp. 73-74). In the latter, they offer what Mansbridge (1996) calls a “protected space” – “informal deliberative enclaves of resistance in which those who lose in each coercive move can rework their ideas and their strategies” (p. 46). Indeed, knitted to this notion of a “protected space” is the observation that Confucianism, which is embedded in Korean culture, has been a key to the success of OhmyNews. In Confucianism, “adhering to discipline and manners is more important than arguing on behalf of one’s own ideas. However, the anonymity of the Internet provides a space for expressing individual desire and personal ideas and opinions without calling attention to oneself by name” (Kim and Hamilton, 2006, p. 549).

In either case, the Internet is a powerful means of communication, but in the end, the “key link between virtual civil society and social capital theory will be the depth of individuals’ commitments to their ‘online communities’ ” (Carothers & Barndt, p. 22).

Co-Opting the Marketplace of Ideas

Long before broadband networks more that two decades ago, the South Korean military created a shunt to limit the subject of discourse and perverted public opinion to its own ends. In fact at one point, even the U.S. government was affected negatively when South Korea’s media announced the United States had condoned the movement of troops off the front lines with North Korea to deal with the protests in Seoul. This widely publicized falsehood, part of what one anonymous U.S. diplomat called a pattern of “systematic lies” (Sterba, 1980, p. A3) that acted to legitimize the military’s actions and distort the U.S. role in the crackdown, prompted the American Embassy to send representatives to the media outlets and government officials to complain (Sterba; Stokes, 1980, August 29; Stokes, 1980, September 4).

There is, of course, nothing new here. This is an old filtering tactic at odds with a well-functioning marketplace of ideas and practiced – to one degree or another – around the world by both governmental and corporate interests separately or in collusion. In fact, in South Korea more than two decades ago, we see in the machinations of the military and colluding governmental forces a blunt-force exemplar of Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model. When viewed, however, through the lens of purported democratic regimes, this effort at what they describe as “manufacturing of consent” is much more veiled and subtle. The model proposes five "filters" – ownership, funding, sourcing, flak, and anticommunism – that “fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns” (1988, p. 2).

In addition, the theory of structural pluralism – especially when it is weakened and ameliorated toward the commonweal – as regards diverse media and consequently views and opinions is also apropos here and dovetails well with the propaganda model. The concept views the media as a supportive subset of a hegemonic system operating as an agent of social control (Demers & Viswanath, 1999) – blatantly as in the case of South Korea, more furtively as it is practiced in a democratic corporatocracy. Equally enticing here in juxtaposition is Marshall McLuhan’s nearly four-decade-old notion that electronic media lead to less specialization, less agency by a few experts, and a more communal world of multifarious points of view (1964) – the core value of a constitutive civil society – and a concept this paper will explore in relation to a postmodern marketplace of ideas.

But for the moment, what is telling here is that period of time since the rule of the generals began has seen the rise of electronic media – computer technology, the Internet, and efforts by both South Korea’s authoritarian and later more democratic rulers to create one of the most broadband-connected nations in the world. Indeed, by the mid-1990s the government in South Korea was promoting “national goals for establishing a ‘knowledge-based society’ and has since been pursuing a broad information and communication policy” (Kim & Hamilton, 2006, p. 548).

That effort at enhancing the ability to communicate digitally has had wholly unexpected ramifications far from the commercial interests that originally drove it. Again, in this nation of about 43 million around the size of Portugal, Hungary or Iceland can be observed the sea-change workings of democracy and communication in the marketplace of ideas – this time through the use of the Internet to eliminate many of the traditional media filters and structures in giving voice to the multitudes of a pluralistic society. This is certainly not – and this point is made again later – an attempt at the magical thinking inherent in techno-deterministic arguments. Yet, it is difficult to refute the fact that digitally mediated communications has created a new virtual geography in a postmodern world as a venue in which the discourse – the lifeblood of democracy – can occur. As Bolter (2001) asserts, “Electronic technology provides a range of new possibilities” (p. 2).

OhmyNews as Avatar

Indeed, the Internet, the growing worldwide complex of digitally mediated communications, has democratic activists crowing that, at last, the public has the means to re-inject into the discourse surrounding the decision-making process the ideals of democracy – in other words, to take back the media from the corporate and governmental interests that hold sway over what Walter Lippmann calls the “pictures in our head” (1922, pp. 3-34). And one of the primary facilities of the digitally mediated communications is the greater degree of interactivity that communication mediated through online offers. It is, in fact, this interactive mode that intensifies the ideal of a marketplace of ideas, especially in this age of the postmodern sensibility, which, as Poster (1995) explains, is the “inability of our intellectual heritage to make sense of our present circumstances” (p. 43). And, as McQuail (1992) observes, “As a social-cultural philosophy ‘post modernism’ stands opposed to the traditional notion of fixed and hierarchical culture. It favours forms of culture which are transient, superficial, appealing to sense rather than reason. Post-modern culture is volatile, illogical, kaleidoscopic, inventive, hedonistic. It certainly favours the newer, audiovisual over the older, print media” (p. 4).

Indeed, in discussing news in the context of digitally mediated communications, the concept of postmodernism is crucial in the sense that a postmodern culture is derived to a large degree, as media theorist Shayla Thiel says, from our electronic media. “With its tendency to blur and blend media, the online newspaper is not as straightforward as its ink counterpart, even if it contains all of the news and information that is in the newspaper. The online newspaper is postmodern” (1998, p. 1).

One current exemplar of just this kind of interactive community journalism and a predictive model of the postmodern newspaper and where many future online news sites could well go is OhmyNews (http://www.OhmyNews.com). A collaborative online newspaper in South Korea that in a few short years – through the aegis of that nation’s enhanced broadband efficiency – has become one of the most influential media outlets in that country and a stunning example of what former San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor has described as “we journalism.” In fact, Gillmor says, “OhmyNews is transforming the 20th century’s journalism-as-lecture model – where organizations tell the audience what the news is and the audience either buys it or doesn’t – into something vastly more bottom-up and democratic” (2003, para. 3).

OhmyNews was founded by Oh Yeon-Ho, a former writer for progressive magazines who wanted to create a news source that would cause readers to exclaim “Oh My God!” (Clifford & Ihlwan, 2003, para. 1) – a term that entered the Korean lexicon through the shtick of a comedian popular at the time the news site began (French 2003, p. 6). Oh, who was born in the South Korean countryside in 1964, has a master’s degree in journalism from Regent University in Virginia. From 1988 to 1999 he worked as both a reporter and director of the news department of an alternative monthly magazine, Mal. After taking part in student protests against the government, he was sentenced to a year in prison in 1986. Oh says he was attracted to the Internet as a forum because he had very little money – certainly not enough to begin a printed publication. “So I thought the Internet was the space where a few people who possessed nothing could bring about results using guerilla methods” (Yu, 2003, para. 14).

Based in Seoul, OhmyNews daily offers South Koreans news from around the world and the nation, and receives 14 million visits daily in a country of around 43 million people (French) and is read – according to the site’s estimates – by 1.2 million people each day. OhmyNews, begun in 2000 with a staff of four, has grown to a staff of more than 60 professional editors, reporters and video journalists who review hundreds of stories submitted each day – and this is what makes the site unique – by 43,000 citizen journalists. The staff usually rejects about a third of them because of various journalistic problems. The site publishes around 150 stories each day, with about only a third of them written by professionals (Hua, 2007).

Contributors are paid between nothing or very little (Citizen Reporters, 2003), and the pay can vary according to how a story is ranked by editors using a forestry terminology ranging from “kindling” to “rare species” (French, para. 10). In addition, the site has created an active training program for citizen journalists to improve their skills.

The online site has had many scoops regarding governmental malfeasance, but more importantly it has been credited with fostering a nationwide get-out-the-vote campaign in December 2002 that helped defeat a conservative candidate and elect a more liberal president, Roh Moo Hyun, who ran as a reformer (Joyce, 2007). In fact, during the election campaign, the site was reportedly receiving 20 million page views a day (French). It was on election day, especially, that the site’s influence could be most clearly seen. When the conservative candidate Lee Hoi Chang started pulling into the lead, a cascade of online interactivity took place as OhmyNews’ readers sent out e-mails and cell-phone text messages urging friends to go to the polls and vote for Roh (French). While the nation’s three leading – and more conservative – newspapers were dismissing the candidate as a dangerous leftist, OhmyNews distributed unedited streaming video of the Millennium Democratic Party’s provincial primaries and campaign events, including Roh’s appearances and speeches. Established media missed the importance of the growing support for Roh, while OhmyNews gave it blanket coverage. “Netizens won,” Oh says of the election. “Traditional media lost” (Clifford & Ihlwan, para. 2).

“OhmyNews is as influential as any newspaper,” a South Korean says. “No policy maker can afford to ignore it. South Korea is changing in ways that we cannot believe ourselves” (Kahney, 2003, para. 7). As it happens, much of OhmyNews’ success and influence certainly has something to do with the fact that around 70 percent of the nation’s population has access to broadband connections.

Citizen Reporters and Objectivity

Oh asserts that after years of government control of the printed and broadcast press and its many ethical indiscretions, readers in South Korea were unhappy with and no longer trusted the conventional press. “Thus on the one hand, discontent with the conventional press, on the other hand, citizens’ desire to talk about themselves. These two things were joined together” (French, para. 12). Oh says he thought up this concept of citizen journalists more than a decade ago while working as a journalist with an activist, alternative publication. It was his objective to “say farewell to 20th-century Korean journalism, with the concept that every citizen is a reporter. The professional news culture has eroded our journalism, and I have always wanted to revitalize it” (French, para. 12).

To be sure, in a participatory online news site like OhmyNews, the lines between reporters and readers are blurred or completely effaced. We can certainly see why this would be a threat to the traditional journalist. As Joshua Meyrowitz observes, the degree of status and authority one has acquired is a function of one’s control over knowledge. “In general, authority is enhanced when information systems are isolated; authority is weakened when information systems are merged” (1985, p. 63). Indeed, we can see examples of that – and the future in the present – in what Meyrowitz calls the “resurgence of oral forms of discourse.” … “Through electronic media, many authorities who once had a clear advantage over the average person are now often put on an equal or lower footing” (p. 161).

Once pluralistic participatory journalism sites such as OhmyNews muscle their way into the marketplace of ideas, one of the first complaints about such non-traditional forms of journalism is their lack of the journalistic norm of objectivity. In this case, OhmyNews has been described as “a wild, inconsistent, unpredictable blend of the Drudge report, Slashdot and a traditional, but partisan, newspaper” (Kahney, para. 9).

OhmyNews tends to be anticorporate, antigovernment and anti-American. Stories are often subjective, oozing with emotion and odd personal tidbits. But they also can be passionate, detailed and knowledgeably written. The site covers everything a traditional newspaper covers – from sports to international politics – but does it with heaps of personality. (para. 10)


And coterminous with the concept of objectivity is the journalistic tool of interactivity. And for OhmyNews, interactivity is, for all intents and purpose, its raison d’être and the major reason for its success, popularity, and influence. For example, we can see this in the cascade of communal chatter during the presidential election. Some of the more prominent interactive devices are a daily readers poll on the front page and links in each story to a comment page in which readers can post comments ranging from supportive to harsh, and they can also vote on whether to approve or disapprove of specific comments. OhmyNews’ editorial policy is largely set by its thousands of contributors and its millions of readers. Don Park, a Korean-American reader, says: “It’s like blogs. It has a personal side and an emotional side. It has human texture. It’s not bland and objective like traditional news. There’s a definite bias. It’s not professional, but you get the facts. … I trust it” (Kahney, para. 11). Indeed, Oh says, OhmyNews “wanted to say goodbye to 20th century journalism where people only saw things through the eyes of the mainstream, conservative media. Our main concept is every citizen can be a reporter. We put everything out there and people judge the truth for themselves" (para. 4).

Still, while the issues of both objectivity and accuracy arise in any discussion of non-traditional journalists, scholars such as John Pavlik have raised the heretical view that too often objectivity, fairness, and accuracy are nothing more than a cloak screen hiding the fact that some bit of reporting is essentially not true. “In other words,” Pavlik says, “a story may be impartial, but that doesn’t make it true” (2001, p. 93). His argument, instead, echoes the previously noted John Stuart Mill and then the words of Meiklejohn, who said successful self-government requires “that unwise ideas must have a hearing as well as wise ones” (1948, p. 15).

The rise of online journalism transforms this issue. As new sources of news emerge and as the public turns to an ever-widening array of news sources, the practices and standards of those diverse sources is increasingly uncertain. Perhaps by moving outside the ideology of objectivity, these alternative news sources may help to put the facts into a more complete context and perspective. Perhaps society collectively will then be able to triangulate on the truth in a way that traditional journalism cannot, because of it objective ideology. (Pavlik, 2001, p. 93)


Willis and Bowman, in their lengthy dissection of citizen journalism, describe such participatory journalism as a “publish, then filter” model rather than the traditional “filter, then publish model” (2003, p.13).

In his analysis of journalistic objectivity, Michael discussed some alternatives to objectivity, and in the context of traditional journalism he criticized each of them as inadequate to the task. However, in the context of this discussion, there are attributes of at least two of these theories of objectivity that are germane. One of them is standpoint epistemology, which Michael describes as a product of feminist critique of objective scientific inquiry. It “is viewed as a counterhegemonic discourse that destabilizes hegemonic discourse” (Michael, 2001, p. 12). In the context of journalism, the reporting of a story should begin from the “perspective of the marginalized groups that are affected by events and issues so that the unrecognized weight of the socially dominant ‘insider’ positions would be counterbalanced” (p. 13). Indeed, to that point, Oh was not only democratic in his outlook, but he also believed that Koreans were more left of center than the media they had access to. Thus, he believed that participation by citizens in their media could shift the balance of “the media landscape by increasing the number of liberal voices” (Hauben, 2005, para. 4).

Michael also notes another approach to objectivity involves what is commonly described as public or civic journalism, in which journalists become active participants in leading readers to re-engage with “public life.” “Public journalists must uncover problems and motivate citizens to seek solutions, but without being led by official policy makers” (p. 11).

Finally, when we stop for a moment to look at the norms of traditional journalism and balance that with what we see in the traditional news media every day, there exists a disparity from the ideal that more than one commentator has noted. For example, Kovach and Rosenstiel have pointed out that such appellations as fairness, balance, and objectivity are fuzzy abstractions upon which no journalist can hang his or her hat. Instead, they say, “The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing” (2001, p. 17).

However, in OhmyNews’s attempt to provide that information, the reader has become participant in gathering and reporting the news, and concomitantly the traditional role of the journalist changes. With OhmyNews, much of its news comes from “either novice reporters or ordinary members of the public who spontaneously send in an interesting yarn that may or may not have been checked and about which they may or may not be disinterested” (Oh My, 2003, para. 2). To that point, in a creed that rings with postmodernism, Oh says OhmyNews “was the complete demolition of conventional media logic and of the concept of journalists. ‘Every citizen is a reporter’ means destruction of the concept of reporters and also the destruction of the concept of articles” (Yu, 2003, para. 19).

In addition, Willis and Bowman point out that citizen journalism is largely unbound by the accretion of strictures that has grown up around the traditional media. In addition, they observe, what to call it has also been confused by the sundry communicative modes new technologies afford. Citizens doing journalism is not just found in blogs, but occurs through newsgroups, forums, chatrooms, and peer-to-peer applications like instant messaging. In their exploration of citizen journalism, Willis and Bowman used the term “participatory journalism,” which they define as:

The act of a citizen, or group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information. The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.

Participatory journalism is a bottom-up, emergent phenomenon in which there is little or no editorial oversight or formal journalistic workflow dictating the decisions of a staff. Instead, it is the result of many simultaneous, distributed conversations that either blossom or quickly atrophy in the Web's social network. (p. 10)


Shapiro describes this process as one of “peeling back a layer of intermediaries who are no longer necessary,” which he calls “disintermediation” (p. 55).

Certainly it is time for us to abandon the idea, if we haven’t done so already, that a fact is true simply because it has been ‘reported’ somewhere. Instead, we must dissect the news in much same way that we interpret a film like Rashomon, in which Akira Kurosawa intentionally presents multiple, inconsistent perspectives on the same event.


But, in retreating from a solely citizen-journalism model, Shapiro insists we must rely more than ever on “certain trusted intermediaries” in the form of quality editors and writers who act as “truth watchers” and offer “the story behind the story” (p. 189).

Meanwhile, other sites that offer news generated by both citizen reporters and trained staff include JanJan (http://www.janjan.jp/) in Japan and any number of sites collected on the international network of the Independent Media Center (http://www.indymedia.org/).

“While the owners and administrators of such sites range widely – from passionate individuals to collectives to upstart nonprofits – these blogs are markedly more democratic than their corporate-run, top-down brethren” (Rheingold, 2003, p. 34), says Howard Rheingold, a guru of activist online news. Note, too, that Rheingold’s expansive definition of blog covers such news sites as OhmyNews, which, he worries, are under threat of extinction through marginalization by such things as “misinformation, disinformation, incredulity and magical thinking” (pp. 34-35). Indeed, Castells (2007) worries that the powerful corporate media have already begun efforts to control the marketplace of ideas by controlling who has access to networks. He cites, as prime examples, Google’s acquisition of YouTube, and the acquisition of MySpace by NewsCorp, Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate.

Before leaving this topic of reliability and credibility, we need to also contextualize for a moment the place of the media in South Korea. The government only lifted press censorship in 1987 (Saxer, 2002) with the end of military rule. Therefore there exist few of the long-term normative behavior standards we would normally associate with journalism in a democracy: For example, opinion-based journalism in Europe, or the U.S. media’s adherence to the creed of objectivity, denigrated by one group of contemporary scholars as a “pathology” (Christians, Ferre, & Fackler, 1993, p. 118). And for many in the public in South Korea, the media have been traditionally viewed as a mouthpiece for government. Thus, one can understand how a dialectical opposite – a mouthpiece of the people – might well succeed despite the many seeming ethical fault lines inherent in a participatory journalism such as OhmyNews.

Civil Society Through Cyberspace

“The crux of direct electronic democracy is that individuals can exercise a whole new kind of civic power,” Shapiro argues. The power involves more than voting online, he says, but offers the citizenry the chance to play a larger role in making the decisions that public officials – acting as our agents – once made for us. “Now, though, technology may allow us to make many of these choices for ourselves. We could become not just citizens, but citizen-governors – each of us playing a role in governing the distribution of resources, the wielding of state power, and the protection of rights” (pp. 153-154).

Similarly, Dahl sees in telecommunications the lubricant of a participatory democracy. He argued even before the explosion in Internet use that it was technically possible:


Telecommunications – read today digitally mediated communications – would help “narrow the gap that separates policy elites from the demos,” that is the gap between those with the specialized knowledge needed to run a modern democracy and those who are governed through what Dahl calls a “minipopulus” (p. 339-340).

By means of telecommunications virtually every citizen could have information about public issues almost immediately accessible in a form (print, debates, dramatization, animated cartoons, for example) and at a level (from expert to novice, for example) appropriate to the particular citizen. Telecommunications can also provide every citizen with opportunities to place questions on this agenda of public issue information. Interactive systems of telecommunication make it possible for citizens to participate in discussion with experts, policymakers, and fellow citizens. (p. 339)


What Shapiro and Dahl are talking about here is revivifying through the aegis of electronics a constitutive civil society – the ground from which democracy is established and sustained and whose very sense of community is a product of a marketplace of ideas. There is nothing new about the idea of civil society. Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French observer of American society and its still developing democracy, admired the mobilizing power of intermediary associations that acted as a public space between the government and its citizens. “As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce in the world, they seek each other out; and when they have found each other, they unite. From then on, they are no longer isolated men, but a power that speaks, and to which one listens” (2000, 1835, p. 492).

Benjamin R. Barber sees in the re-establishment of civil society both here in America and globally the salvation of democracy, which is being torn apart by “integrative modernization and aggressive economic and cultural globalization” and the atomizing tribalism and reactionary fundamentalism of Jihad (2001, p. xii). Since the time of de Tocqueville, Barber says, civil society, squeezed by the confrontation between the state and market, has nearly vanished as such actors as “schools, churches, unions, foundations and other associations” have become nothing more than special interests with little legitimacy (pp. 282-283). However, Barber says, while it is fine to talk about the efficacy of civil society, an effort must be made to reinvigorate it in the 21st century by “reconstructing civil society as a framework for the reinvention of democratic citizenship” (p. 284).

What Barber is reiterating here is John Dewey’s belief that democracy is an extension of community life. “Every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with the operation of factors which tended to eliminate distance between peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one another” (Dewey, 1916, p. 100). And that is the point and the strength of a functioning civil society, which is, Dewey says, the foundation of democracy.

A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity. (p. 101)


In a similar vein, former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott has identified advances in technology as a major factor behind democratization since even the most fortified borders dissolve in the blitz – early in history – of radio, then television (followed by cable and satellite), followed by the fax machine, e-mail and the Internet (1996). Barber, too, sees in technology a way of reconstructing “electronic wards and teleassemblies. But this will happen only if markets are not left to determine how these technologies will be developed and deployed” (p. 288).

Conclusion

Knitted to the link between technology and the marketplace of ideas is Castells’s assertion that the contemporary “battle of the human mind” takes place for the most part through the venues of communication and that this has only been ramified by what he calls the “network society” in which counters to power – to established institutions – can arise much more easily than in the past. “As a result, power relations, that is the relations that constitute the foundation of all societies, as well as the processes challenging institutionalized power relations are increasingly shaped and decided in the communication field” (2007, p. 239). Castells argues that the process of persuasion or creating a particular point of view is not the lie of propaganda but the absence in the media of explicit messages. “What does not exist in the media does not exist in the public mind, even if it could have a fragmented presence in individual minds, (p. 241). In other words, the media constitute the “space where power is decided” (p. 242).

Castells uses the term “counter-power” to describe activists challenging and changing the institutions of a society, a transforming process made muscular through the aegis of digitization and “mass self-communication” (p. 249). However, he rejects the notion that the tools of the digital age are techno-determinative, that digitally mediated communication somehow creates social movements. Rather, digital technology is “a medium, it is a social construction, with its own implications” (p. 249).

One of these implications, certainly, is Oh’s assertion that journalism is changing, and that in the 21st century it will become fundamentally different because “if a reader wants to, he can convert himself into a reporter and this is realized through the Internet.”

Now professional journalists have to survive not only competition among themselves, but also from that with ordinary netizens. The only way to compete now is through the quality of their articles. That means that the age of competing through the name card “I am a New York Times reporter” has gone. When a New York Times reporter writes an article and an ordinary citizen – whether he is a professor or a neighbor – writes an article criticizing it splendidly, then the citizen becomes the winner. (Yu, Section 3, para. 29)


This “counter-power” (Castells, 2007, p. 249) and its postmodern dismantling of hierarchies and traditions affects not only journalism, but also rejects other notions of “fixed and hierarchical culture” (McQuail, 1992, p4.) and refutes what Ong (1982) calls “vatic” (p. 78) texts. It does so through a marketplace of ideas created within digitally mediated communication’s participation and interaction in the sampling of the rich interactive discursive environment of text, video, audio, and graphics within the realms of interactive public forums, group and one-on-one chat rooms, participatory journalism, e-mail, and online participatory news sites such as OhmyNews.

The online news medium is, as Bolter and Grusin (2002) have noted, a remediation of the printed news medium, that is, the representation of one medium in another medium. Still, in exploring the effects of new media technologies on culture, Bolter and Grusin are disinclined to see the workings of technological determinism. “New digital media are not external agents that come to disrupt an unsuspecting culture. They emerge from within cultural contexts, and they refashion other media, which are embedded in the same or similar contexts” (p. 19). The door has only now just opened to those contexts, and so this paper has attempted to feel out the open-source implications of citizen journalism from more than one tangent so as to begin to grasp the slippery ethical verbiage, conceits, and prejudices that surround traditional journalism. Citizen journalism – made exponentially effective through the digitally mediated communications – is so new that a successful model has yet to find ground to sustain it in the West. Instead, it has taken root west of our western world where late capitalism has sloughed off the autocrat in a land whose media is largely barren of the ethical verbiage, conceits, and prejudices inherent to traditional western journalism.

Still, we must come to some understanding of digitally mediated citizen journalism as an effective model of transformative communications. Why? For one, it appeals to our ideal of journalism as aegis of civil society and democracy. For another, if reified on our own ground, it would acknowledge our very pluralism and valorize the voices of our diversity. This very mosaicness then calls for a closer look at online citizen journalism through the lens of postmodernism – not merely as the online remediation of printed newspapers but as a refashioning of journalism into a fragmented, relativistic, intertextual, hyperlinked, interactive, and infinitely mass reproduced simulacra of reality unmediated by the elites who adhere to the structure of traditional media.


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