Last week I wrote about the media being "The Fourth Estate", another check on the United States Federal Government in addition to the system of checks and balances that the three branches have on each other. But the media doesn't just play a role in checking the power of government, it is crucial to shaping the government of a democracy as well. Media has an incredibly valuable influence on voters, and advertising and press coverage are of utmost importance to candidates. Ahead of the 2012 elections, The Huffington Post is launching an initiative called OffTheBus to increase citizen coverage of the election. In Howard Fineman's article about the initiative, "HuffPost Launches OffTheBus Citizen Journalism Project Ahead of 2012 Elections", he describes some of The Huffington Post's reasoning for creating OffTheBus.
A long time member of the Washington Press Corps, Fineman admits that the mainstream news media often doesn't cover politics well.
"We can be trivial, shortsighted, credulous, ideologically blinkered and timid -- on a good day," Fineman said.
Fineman explains why the initiative is called "OffTheBus".
According to Fineman, "In 1973, Timothy Crouse wrote a path-breaking book about political journalism called The Boys on the Bus. The national press, he explained, had become a story, if not THE story, and the paradoxically insulated world they inhabited on the campaign trail wasn't always the best place to get the real story."
The project fosters both centralization, compiling the stories from citizen journalists on The Huffington Post, and diversity, gathering many different stories from different perspectives. Citizen journalists can report some stories better than the mainstream news media and they will report stories that matter more to their locality. Locality is an extremely important point that Fineman makes, and it's something that mainstream media can never offer on its own. Citizen journalist can report stories catering to the wants of small audiences, stories which would be impractical for larger news organizations, even a local news station, to report at times.
It will be interesting to see what stories emerge from citizen journalists as the 2012 election unfolds.
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