Is Hipstamatic a legitimate tool for photojournalism?

From the British Journal of Photography:

For Ben Khalifa, whether to use Hipstamatic or not remains a personal choice. "I think what's really annoying is that all these debates about the aesthetics and whether it's a good idea to use Hipstamatic don't make sense. The story is at the heart of photojournalism, and if a photographer believes he can tell a better story by using Hipstamatic, that's his choice. Hipstamatic, like a Leica camera or anything else, is just a tool and nothing else." 

He adds: "Photography was never objective and never will, so I think it's not an argument to say that Hipstamatic images are not valid because a filter was used. When we used a darkroom in the past, we did the exact same thing. It wasn't as fast as what Hipstamatic does, but the result is the same. If you look at the trend for radical black-and-white images, it's also a filter - a filter applied by photographers because that's the way they want to show their images and to express their ideas. It's exactly the same thing."