NPR Controversy

As I'm sure you all have hard by now, NPR terminated the contract of news analyst Juan Williams after his disparaging comments on FOX News regarding Muslims. This post on PJNet features a video put together by contributor Leonard Witt asking CEO Vivian Schiller about the speech she just made on that matter. Witt had some pretty intelligent questions and Schiller mostly handled them well even if some of her answers might have been too vague. At about 1:27 she bought up the "role" of a journalist and even though her answer was kind of all over the place, I would say I mostly agree with her viewpoint when the says journalists should "draw out the truth from others." Two people commenting on the post were arguing over her credentials. I'm not really sure about that myself either, so I really have no say there. She was also asked about donating money to NPR as a journalist and he answer was that is was perfectly fine since you would be donating money to a news organization and not a political organization. I can see how that makes sense, but most people will agree that NPR comes across as pretty liberal. Obviously, more and more "news" outlets have been inundated with biased pundits from both sides which has been blurring the distinction between "news" and "political" organizations.

An Little Bit About All Of This...

As you may have already guessed, my name is Casey Killingsworth. I am currently a sophomore at CU Boulder. I declared Pre-Journalism as my major and I hope to be accepted into the School Of Journalism and Mass Communication by next fall. This blog was initially started by me just on assignment from Caitlin Ring. She is my Contemporary Mass Media professor. That class is a prerequisite to being accepted into the SJMC. We all needed to have a blog of some sort for her class and those who didn't had to create one. I was racking my brain for a couple of weeks trying to figure out a fresh, original approach to what my blog would be about. Then, she briefly touched on "citizen journalism" in class. She joked that most people would rather have some one who went to school to study journalism report on the breaking urgent news of the day than just any person off the street and that gave me an idea. I could use my blog (and what I'm learning so far in Principles of Journalism...another SJMC prerequisite) to offer some of my critiques and constructive criticism on examples of citizen journalism that I find on the web. Most of the material for this blog will most likely come from either Public Journalism Network or NowPublic. Whenever I can find the time, I will seek out an article that catches my interest and offer my point of view. Feel free to post comments if you have an opinion to share. Stay tuned.