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Citizen journalist gets the Pentagon in hot water
There are examples of government failing in North Carolina. Examples, a traditional journalist did not find. Examples, a father from Menomonie came across, documented and broadcast to the world. Ed Frawley found Fort Bragg, the US Military base in North Carolina, in shambles when he went there to welcome his son home from war three weeks ago. It angered him. It motivated him to become, for a moment in time, a citizen journalist. "One of the realities is that new technology both in terms of gathering news and publishing news is now accessible to anyone," media ethicist Jane Kirtley said of citizen journalism. Frawley had at Fort Bragg what a traditional journalist did not, total access to a facility that needed to be exposed. He had tools anyone can acquire, a camera and a point of view. "There is nothing wrong with having a reason or a righteous indignation that powers your interest in pursuing a story. The key is to make it clear to anyone looking at it what that frame is," Kirtley said of Frawley's posting on YouTube that illustrated the extreme ill-repair of the Fort Bragg barracks. Frawley fully disclosed on his YouTube expose that he is a father of a soldier living in those barracks and he made it clear that his son, Sgt. Jeff Frawley of the 82nd Airborne Division, did not ask him to make the conditions public. The results of the posting on YouTube were almost instant. The Pentagon says it is inspecting every barracks now and apologizing for the conditions at Fort Bragg. "To have these heroes come back to that condition is uncalled for. The Army leadership is not going to let this stand and we're going to take care it," General Richard Cody, the Army Vice Chief of Staff, said today. The Army may be taking care of it sooner, rather than later, because a citizen saw a story and reported it. That's journalism, working, in it's most basic way.
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