Citizen Journalism - democracy or chaos?

Citizen journalism is a fast-growing worldwide phenomenon.

‘We are all journalists now,’ boast the twitterers and bloggers who – thanks to the internet – can talk to the world as reporter, broadcaster, publisher, and editor.

In two programmes for the BBC World Service, Michael Buerk goes to the heart of the phenomenon, discovering the best and the worst, analysing the potential and the dangers, and focusing on issues of truth and trust.

‘Authenticity’ is what citizen journalists believe they are about, seeing themselves as Davids fighting against Goliaths. But critics point to problems of fakery, manipulation, partisanship, bias, and lack of accountability. Why it should be assumed that ‘the little man’ is necessarily morally superior to ‘the big organisation’?

Yet in countries where freedom of expression is repressed, it is bloggers who are challenging authoritarian regimes in ways traditional journalists cannot. Citizen journalists are enabling the rest of us to read stories and to see pictures that repressive regimes would rather stayed secret.

The critics remain vocal. What has really been achieved? Small victories, perhaps, but no Watergates as yet. And will this phenomenon extend democracy or end in chaos?

Part two - Egyptian bloggers

In the second episode Michael Buerk visits Cairo and experience for himself how bloggers - arguably among the most hounded anywhere in the world - are taking on the Egyptian government.

First broadcast on Wednesday 9 September 2009.