I love Samatha Power for her work especially on Rwanda but what I’ve hated reading and hearing is that somehow British journalism has ‘low ethical standards’ compared to the US. As you say, allowing powerful people to take back quotes is not journalism - that’s cow-towing to power. Samantha made a mistake and the journalist showed the real opinion of the Obama camp (one I might agree with). That’s journalism.

It’s interesting to me that US journalism is only now asking hard questions of Obama. There’s history here, with the failure to similarly asked questions before the Iraq War most notably.

It seems to me that the UK has an extremely diverse and tough journalistic heritage which the US appears to have lost. Even with Iraq, where papers here had much criticism about what they didn’t report, we still had different voices heard whereas in the US it was a monolithic block - presumably why so many Americans started reading British news.

Frankly, there’s an element of jingoism and self-protection from US journalists in this episode where they see ‘foreigners’ covering the election. Well excuse me but your decisions do effect the rest of the world and we do have a legitimate interest.

As for your anonymous J-school student (it’s not me, if anyone’s wondering; I’m not in J-school). Talk about speaking truth to power– I don’t mean to be snide, but I hope you have bigger targets to take on than an anonymous journalism student’s unpublished emails?

Sheesh. Michael Zimmer of the Yale Information Society Project has guest edited First Monday’s March 2008 issue on Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0. There is much to sink your teeth into here. Seth would love this article by Søren Mørk Petersen: “Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation.”

(If you *are* that journalism student, say hello! why not post here?)

Now, the guy asking the “citizen journalism” question is probably not going to articulate the following point well. But there’s a real issue that the right-wing attack-machine sees in it a sort of loophole in the rules of the game. It reminds me a lot of a fantasy novel with a plot aspect that a group of assassins wants to kill a character who is in Sanctuary Ground, so the goal is to lure him into territory that he *thinks* is part of Sanctuary, but really isn’t - then they can kill him without violating any Sacred Oaths.

But why discuss that, when you can slam a nobody, presumably with standard blog-evangelism rhetoric [e.g. You used word 'X' as identical to 'Y', but rather than addressing your point about 'Y', I'll note word 'X' can also mean 'A' or 'B', so I'll spend a whole paragraph berating you about how great 'A' and 'B' are ... ]

What you state above about off the record is exactly what I was taught. It’s an agreement that is decided on by both parties - and it is decided beforehand. I was also told that for less-media savvy folk you should explain to them the nuances of what they are saying and how public it can be. But this Obama adviser should have known better.

More concerning is the student interview you declined. I’m very curious to see this email exchange. I had a phone call the other day that I could feel going a certain way and I felt I had to preface every statement I made with something along the lines of “this is a bigger issue than I or you realize but….” or something to put it in a larger context.