Tuesday's episode of The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC featured a spirited debate between Paul Carr, author of the article NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how 'citizen journalists' can't handle the truth from TechCrunch, and Jeff Jarvis, CUNY professor and journalist. The two discussed the idea of citizen journalism and its uses for mainstream media, particularly in regards to last week's shootings in Fort Hood, Texas.

Jarvis, a longtime advocate of citizen journalism, argued that the ability for the media to gain information from eyewitnesses through Twitter and other social media, and then use said information in a journalistic story following vetting and fact checking, was a large advantage that the Internet has provided.

Carr, calling in form his home in California, argued that social media was instant, and thus did not allow for the kind of vetting that would constitute traditional reportage. To Carr, there is a difference between tweeting and tweeting the truth.

Citizen journalism takes advantage of the idea of the general population that because "someone is tweeting from the ground that that is the unfiltered truth that the media is somehow going to mess up... its just rumor that happens to be able to be shared with the whole world. The word citizen journalism suggests truth and facts that often times are not there," said Carr in the debate.

He used the same specific example that he did in his article from TechCrunch: Tearah Moore- a soldier present inside the hospital in Fort Hood who tweeted throughout the shootings. She even posted a picture that she took of one of the injured as he was coming into the hospital. She claimed to have information about the shootings and kept declaring that the media needed to contact her for the real story. Most of her information, however, turned out to be incorrect or rumors.

When people use Twitter, according to Carr, they use it to let their friends know what they are up to, and to find out what is happening in their friends' lives. Thus, when people read Twitter, they read it as news. When Moore tweeted, she was doing so to get what she thought to be accurate information out to the public. That is why, according to Carr, people need to learn how to use Twitter properly.

He believes that as a society, we need to stop sharing everything, and stop thinking that we are sharing things only with our friends, when really we are also making it available to the rest of the world. People were outside the base looking for any scrap of news on their loved ones and so they clung to any tiny bit of news that they could find on Twitter. When Moore tweeted that the shooter was dead or posted a picture of a victim, that is what everyone saw and those that were desperate for information clung to it as truth.

Jarvis then countered Carr by asking him to name a single person who has said that citizen journalism is without fault; however, he continued, "just because one person gets it wrong does that besmirch the whole medium?"

According to Jarvis, citizen journalism is "a different structure in which witnesses can share what they see, and that is going to change news. It used to be that news didn't happen until the reporter got there... now the sources publish." This, he continues, confuses journalists because the story starts before the journalists arrive. What journalists need to ask themselves is how to add journalism to this existing information. Reporters checked Moore's claims before they ran them- if they did at all. As Jarvis states, "news is not a product- its a process."

The two writers agreed at the end of the debate that the new real-time culture that has been created by the 24-hour news channels and the Internet has caused the public to create an expectation to know all things at all times. This mind set, they both agreed, is not healthy for productive journalism. Reporters need to go beyond the tweets and the instant demand for information and investigate the stories before they publish them.

While Carr and Jarvis disagree as to the extent that Twitter should be used in media broadcast, they both agree on the power that it now has over the world at large, a power that should be countered with a healthy dose of media literacy.

What does all of this mean for the future of journalism? Will Twitter eventually become a reputable news source? Or will the public eventually learn to take everything posted on Twitter with a grain of salt?