The literature on online citizen journalism tends to construe user-generated citizen media as inherently counter-hegemonic, as the emerging, as yet unformed but nonetheless virile antithesis to the traditional media. This article argues that while the vigorous profusion of web-based citizen media has the potential to inaugurate an era of dynamic expansion of the deliberative space and even serve as a counterfoil to the suffocating dominance of the discursive space by the traditional, mainstream media, we are now witnessing a trend toward the aggressive cooptation of these citizen media by corporate media hegemons. To demonstrate this, I study ‘iReport.com,’ a YouTube-type, user-generated citizen news site launched by the Cable News Network (CNN). I argue that the trend toward corporate-sponsored citizen media may, in the final analysis, blur the distinction between citizen and mainstream journalism.
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