Independent Research
THE FOUNDATION
THE GRADATION
THE MOTIVATION
A free global press serves 4 primary purposes: to hold government leaders accountable to the people; to publicize issues that need attention; to educate citizens so they can make informed decisions and; to connect people with each other in civil society. In 2015 Freedom House, an organization that tracks global press, reported press freedom had reached its lowest point in over a decade. However since the turn of the century a wave of civilian involvement and new social technologies have paved the way for the rise of citizen journalism or "the collection, dissemination, and analysis of news and information by the general public, especially by means of the internet".​ This project will employ document analysis to focus on identifying key factors in the relationship between press freedom and citizen journalism
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The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom is both a first hand and historical account of press injustices as told by Joel Simon, long time Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, another global press index that acts as a watchdog for media injustice around the world. This book made me painfully aware of the dangerous atmosphere that becomes a commonplace when accepting a job as a journalist on a global (and sometimes domestic) level.
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The book made several notices of citizen journalism playing a factor in increasing government opression of media. In one of these instances, citizen journalism (mainly from university students) became the main news source for global citizens in the 2009 Iranian presedential elections following the government ordered explusion of foreign journalists covering the election. The widespread popularity of amateur journalism subsequently led the Iranian government to join the aggressive China led campaign to regulate the internet and essentially cleanse it of any information the government deems unfit.
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The story fueled my curiosity on the subject. As I delved further into primary research regarding press freedom, I seemed to come up with another question for every answer found. Thus, I decided to create this research project in hopes of gaining a thourough and complex understanding of one of the main issues pressing global communicators for last couple decades.
This project is supervised by FIU Honors College and Journalism professor Dr. Fred Blevens. Dr. Blevens holds a PhD. in Journalism from the Univeristy of Missouri and is a leader in the emerging discipline of news literacy, which responds to the glut of digital information by empowering citizens with tools to critically analyze information that shape global opinion, according the FIU's website.
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My research, done as a co-curricular learning project in an effort to achieve an Excellence in Global Learning Medallion, employs a document analysis method within a phenomenology research design to draw from different sources and present a cohesive picture of the recent paradigm shift in the world news model, then analyze the effects declining global press freedom has on the increase of citizen journalism around the world.
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