It’s the day Watchmen arrives, and I still have a few more hours before I leave for the theater. I’ll give a review later, but I want to talk about something that ties into the movie, but veers into a more serious subject.

I was watching CNN and they had some I-Report on about some woman who was bad about mortgage payments and the Obama plan. Apparently her story was so compelling they interviewed her on their regular newscast.

Actually let me back up a bit and explain about the I-Report. This is a project CNN does to get regular people involved in news reports. People do their own stories, film them and post them online. As you can imagine, you get a good wide ranging source of material, but anything left to amateurs means the quality is going to vary greatly.

The woman interviewed by CNN is a good example. She did less of a story than it was of a ‘oh woe is me’ piece about how she lost her job and the house was being foreclosed on and, I guess to show how hip she was, did the quote from the movie Network by saying she was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore.

Yes, she came off as a whiny person. I understood what she was trying to accomplish, but it was done badly. It didn’t help that the footage CNN used has a YouTube grainy feel to it, even though they had access to the original upload and maybe could have cleaned it up a bit.

In any event, when they interviewed the woman she didn’t have a lot to say. She was more venting mouth than giving us the real deal on how she got where she was and what she wanted done to solve it.

The problem with giving anyone a camera and having them ‘report’ news is many of us don’t know how to report news. Hell, many of us don’t know how to shoot video, so you end up with something that looks bad and is, more often than not, a self centered blabbering that contributes nothing.

That’s what brings me to Watchmen. There was another person with an I-Report that talked about the movie. Apparently they aired this on CNN but I mercifully saw it online. I say mercifully because I was able to shut the thing off after 20 seconds. No, he didn’t trash the film, quite the contrary he praised it. What I found terrible was the lack of professionalism, research and, well, lighting that this guy did. First off it looked like the guy forgot to pay his electric bill and was lit by a flashlight. Twice in the 20 seconds I saw he referred to the movie as The Watchmen and not Watchmen. Yeah, could have been a simple mistake, but he qualified himself at the beginning as being a big comic book fan, claiming to have read comics for years (and by the looks of him he was around 30 so he was reading for a good long time) yet he NEVER heard of Watchmen?!

How in the world can you call yourself a comic book person and not read Watchmen. It’s like saying you major in American literature and you haven’t read Moby Dick or Tom Sawyer. It’s something you can’t claim with a straight face.

So you have a guy claiming to be a comic book fan who never read ‘The Watchmen’ that said, and this was the thing that made me turn him off, that it began as a graphic novel. Yes, I’m sure if he NEVER read the book he wouldn’t know this, but a little reading would have told him Watchmen started off as a ‘gasp’ limited series comic book that was packaged in a graphic novel format later on to et sold in bookstores. That’s comics history 101.

Now, I’m railing against this guy just not to pick on him, but to show how outlets are so starved for material they’re willing to let people with no skills at all produce content. Yes, it’s liberating that citizens can produce something for all to see, but in the pursuit of this many people rather vent than inform, rather opine rather than shed light on an issue. While I like the I-Report format, many of the stories I’ve seen haven’t been that good. They have been citizens griping about something, not really giving insight or solutions. They have been like the Republicans criticizing Obama. They’re easy to point out flaws, but slow to offer their own solutions.

The citizen reporting, in a vast majority of cases, doesn’t follow the reporter creed of the five who, what, where, when and how nor, if you look at them as personal stories, are never as honest and balanced as they should be about the person or event being reported on.