Bloggers providing distributed watchdog journalism
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 15 September 2006 at 09:00
Tags: Journalism
Citizen journalists in the United States have been demonstrating their potential to collectively hold politicians to account over public spending.
With the “Exposing Earmarks” project, a loose coalition of pressure groups from across the political spectrum asked citizen journalists to help researching 1,800 “pork barrel” projects — wasteful “earmark” amendments to budget bills designed to channel to federal spending to the constituents of individual members of Congress. Bloggers did the digging on the local beneficiaries of the pork projects, reporting back to the central site.
With more than 10,000 pork projects worth $29 billion per year, the annual graft investigations require far more legwork than journalists could do alone. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has described the anti-pork swarm as an example of “networked journalism” — collaborative efforts between established pressure groups, journalists, and ordinary citizens to hold government to account.
“It’s probably the biggest expansion of government oversight that we’ll ever have,” Thomas Schatz of the pressure group Citizens Against Government Waste told USA Today’s Richard Wolf.
US political blogger Sean-Paul Kelly argued that the story highlighted the potential of blogs to “hyperlocalise” a story by “taking a national issue, feeding it into the local blogosphere and having it come back out the national blogosphere-media complex amplified in a way the local news could never do it.”
In a related story, Porkbusters.org readers used a process of elimination to identify senators who had anonymously blocked a bill that would have created a public database of government grants and contracts. Bloggers elicited denials from nearly all senators before two acknowledged having made objections.
The efforts have forced the legislators into two u-turns. Congress this week changed its rules to require that the sponsors of future budget “earmarks” have to be identified. A bill creating the public spending database is also in the works.
Tags: Journalism
