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Last September, CBS launched Eyemobile for iPhone, a service where iPhone-sporting "citizen journalists" can photograph or record news as it happens and post it on the CBS Eyemobile site.

The network's decision to incorporate citizen journalism is part of a trend whereby "legitimate" news sources — Wired, CNN, The New York Times, Fast Company — increasingly make room for user-generated content.

The logic is, a person already at the scene of a spontaneous news event will be able to cover it more fully than a reporter who hears about it after the fact. Many newsworthy events appear on YouTube first, for example, which has driven the video sharing site to launch a citizen journalism news channel.

But what CBS is discovering, perhaps ahead of the curve, is that events deemed "newsworthy" to some people may be amateur pornography to others.

COO Karl Johnson of agency BrandContent uploaded the CBS Eyemobile app earlier this week. He was almost immediately rewarded with the image of a woman bent over a kitchen stove with her skirt hiked up. He also saw an explicit image of three women standing on a street, performing sexual acts on one another. (Advertising Age has that image available for review.)

The latter image was eloquently titled, "Drunk Womens." The description read, "these ladys didnt want to wait fir the hotel room" [sic].

The story is amusing enough, but CBS' failure to moderate submissions could chill economically-strained advertisers trying to safeguard their reputations against such content. Google advertises on these clips through AdMob.

Johnson, for one, says the experience makes him uncomfortable about advertising his own clients on the Eyemobile app. "It doesn't seem consistent with CBS brand image by any stretch of the imagination," he said.

CBS claims submitted content is moderated, but "this is the first known incident along these lines [since launching the service in April]," a CBS spokesperson said. "It was removed promptly and we will redouble our efforts in this regard."

AdMob corroborates the network's defensive position. "CBS notified AdMob of an inappropriate piece of content on this application and we worked with CBS to immediately remove all ads from this application until it is fixed," said VP Jason Spero of Marketing at AdMob.

According to Advertising Age, Fox News, CNN and the Associated Press also have iPhone apps that enable users to submit videos of breaking news — which often goes live before any moderation can take place.