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Some days, a headline will make an unreconstituted journalist chuckle.

Take this one, from the MediaWire blog of the journalism think-tank The Poynter Institute: "Study: Getting your information from Fox News is worse than not following news at all."

The post by Steve Myers links to a study conducted at New Jersey's Fairleigh Dickinson University. Researchers polled a group of New Jersey residents about current events and asked where the respondents got their news.

In one finding, people who reported they got their information from Fox News were 18 percent less likely to know that this year's uprisings in Egypt toppled Hosni Mubarak's government, and 6 percent more likely to think the current Syrian unrest had toppled the government there, than people who don't follow the news at all (factoring in political partisanship and other factors).

"The results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don't watch any news at all," said Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst on the poll.

What news sources produced more-knowledgeable news hounds? According to the study, The New York Times, USA Today, NPR and "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."

For hardened journalists (and I'm typing this column from a room full of them), the response to this story was a variation of "That figures."

Most journalists harbor a bias against Fox News. (Cue the Fox News fans shouting, "See? Told you so!") The bias isn't about the channel's right-wing political leanings — I've known journalists on all parts of the political spectrum (and some with no particular political leanings at all) who dislike Fox News.

The bias many journalists have is against the way Fox News practices journalism — by mixing political opinion and uninformed conjecture into a blender, pushing the "frappĂ©" button and calling it "fair and balanced."

This bias doesn't just target Fox News. It's aimed at anyone who applies the label "journalism" without doing the job properly.

Take, for example, the thorny topic of "citizen journalism" — where ordinary people, those not paid by a traditional news outlet, gather information that is then published or broadcast.

When it works well, "citizen journalism" can do marvels. A great example, as Zack Whittaker pointed out on ZDNet, was the fusillade of YouTube-loaded videos of police pepper-spraying student protesters at the University of California, Davis last week. The videos of callous cops spraying peaceful protesters belied the official police account of the incident and prompted an investigation and the suspension of two police officers.

The flipside of "citizen journalism" comes when the news outlet doesn't properly screen what it's being fed.

That's what happened in the curious case of West Valley City Mayor Mike Winder, who employed a pseudonym, Richard Burwash, to write articles about his city for Deseret Connect — a "citizen journalism" program launched by the Deseret News and KSL.

Winder's stated goal was to counter the high level of crime news in the Deseret News with more positive stories. (Winder, in interviews, claimed he did this with "a pure heart," though one wonders what the perception of West Valley City having a lot of crime was doing to the mayor's re-election prospects.)

In a story in The Tribune last Sunday, reporter Paul Beebe dissected the Winder affair and Deseret Connect's screening of its contributors.

Beebe quoted Kim Zarkin, assistant professor of communications at Westminster College, who said the Winder incident "exposed the fraud that Deseret Connect is." Beebe also interviewed Deseret News CEO Clark Gilbert, who implemented Deseret Connect and defends it as an innovative way to transmit news in an era when declining revenues make it harder for news outlets to keep full-time staffers employed. (Beebe also noted that The Tribune had a short-lived experiment in reader-submitted stories — and could return to that model, as its parent company's new CEO has stated his belief in the concept.)

Old-line journalists who criticize "citizen journalism" initiatives often are accused of being behind the times, of reflexively opposing anything that threatens their next paycheck. (Of course, any journalist who cares that much about a paycheck has already quit the business for a job in public relations.)

The truth is that journalism is a profession. But, thanks to the First Amendment, it's one of the few professions that don't require a license or an advanced degree (as doctors and lawyers do) — which means anyone who claims to be a journalist can be one.

But with every mayor with a nom de plume, or cable TV network with money and a lot of axes to grind, the word "journalism" gets cheapened another small amount, and those of us who practice that profession faithfully and honestly have to work a little harder to prove our worth.

Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form at http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Contact him via email at movies@sltrib.com. Follow him on Twitter at @moviecricket or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/themoviecricket.