Perry: Journalists — tweeting our way to center stage
Growing up, I could tell you who Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon were. The journalists behind the local newspaper I read every morning? Twelve-year-old me had no clue. Print news used to employ a clear-cut dichotomy: you either wrote the news or you were the news. Existing in the crossover affected your legitimacy.
During criticism of media outlets’ coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in May, San Francisco Chronicle metro intern Omar Rashad tweeted: “Journalists need to stop making themselves the story. This may make some folks upset but it needs to be said.” The full thread, which responded to an essay by an Associated Press reporter about Israeli rockets demolishing his bureau, also reads: “Instead of writing essays about you, showing the specific details of how you were targeted by an airstrike, please write about the very people you’re supposed to report on with that same depth. THAT is supposed to be your job. It is wrong to shift the lens to the journalist.”