Jay Rosen, a founder of OffTheBus, has written a great piece on how Obama's "bitter" comments got picked up by a citizen journalist, Mayhill Fowler, a 61 year old Obama donor who was at the West Coast fundraiser and heard those comments:
We're in uncharted territory here. Descriptor languages missing. People get mad when they don't know what to call things. Mad or daft. Like when Mike Allen of the Politico, listing 12 reasons 'bitter' is bad for Obama, couldn't even find the word "website" to describe the Huffington Post. It became "a liberally oriented organization that was Obama's outlet of choice when he wanted to release a personal statement distancing himself from some comments by the Rev. Wright." Sounds like some 527 group.
Citizen journalism isn't a hypothetical in this campaign. It's not a beach ball for newsroom curmudgeons, either. It's Mayhill Fowler, who had been in Pennsylvania with Obama, listening to the candidate talk about Pennsylvanians to supporters in San Francisco, and hearing something that didn't sound right to her.
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