Wiki

I gained a lot of insight about the problems with American journalism from a lot of different expert perspectives throughout the production of The Echo Chamber documentary.

The media's objectivity standards limit the framing of issues to a very narrow spectrum of perspectives.

One way to overcome this limitation is for journalists to use much more sophisticated analytical techniques that have been developed by the Central Intelligence Agency. These techniques take a more scientific approach for weighing the available evidence against as set of possible explanations for the behavior and motivations of political leaders. These techniques provide very effective techniques for detecting political deception, and would be very beneficial investigative and analytical tool for journalism.

By combing this type of standardized analytical framework with the Internet, then it will be easier to harness the collective wisdom of a decentralized force of volunteer citizen journalists. By collaborating with these civically-engaged citizens, then the press should be able to challenge deceptive partisan framing and defy traditional media logic by investigating complex issues.

PRWatch.org is starting to do some more collaborative journalism, such as this discovery of photoshopped propaganda found by a volunteer citizen journalist in Spain.

This pro-Liberation photo is of a US soldier holding an Iraqi child with the added caption of "She's glad he's there. Are you?" This citizen journalist finds another version of the same scene that has a caption that says that the girl is actually a boy, and that his mother had just killed by crossfire.

Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales was at the Harvard Blogging Conference this weekend, and he spoke about the Neutral Point of View Policy (aka NPOV) and how it might apply to Wiki News.

Wales said that the NPOV policy works best as a means to get a lot of people to collaborate and synthesize news from other primary news sources, but that it would be probably difficult for WikiNews to do much original reporting. They have high standards of neutrality and verifiability, and they also don't accept original reporting unless it is from a known and trusted wikipedian.