Citizen Witnessing E-Book

Stuart Allan

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Concepts in Journalism
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 461

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

What role can the ordinary citizen perform in news reporting? This question goes to the heart of current debates about citizen journalism, one of the most challenging issues confronting the news media today.

In this timely and provocative book, Stuart Allan introduces the key concept of ‘citizen witnessing’ in order to rethink familiar assumptions underlying traditional distinctions between the ‘amateur’ and the ‘professional’ journalist. Particular attention is focused on the spontaneous actions of ordinary people – caught-up in crisis events transpiring around them – who feel compelled to participate in the making of news. In bearing witness to what they see, they engage in unique forms of journalistic activity, generating firsthand reportage – eyewitness accounts, video footage, digital photographs, Tweets, blog posts – frequently making a vital contribution to news coverage.

Drawing on a wide range of examples to illustrate his argument, Allan considers citizen witnessing as a public service, showing how it can help to reinvigorate journalism’s responsibilities within democratic cultures. This book is required reading for all students of journalism, digital media and society.

Leseprobe

Citizen Witnessing

Key Concepts in Journalism

Citizen Witnessing, Stuart Allan

Objectivity in Journalism, Steven Maras

Reinventing Professionalism, Silvio Waisbord

Citizen Witnessing

Revisioning Journalism in Times of Crisis

Stuart Allan

Copyright © Stuart Allan 2013

The right of Stuart Allan to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-6443-9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

1 ‘Accidental Journalism’

2 The Journalist as Professional Observer

3 Bearing Witness, Making News

4 Witnessing Crises in a Digital Era

5 News, Civic Protest and Social Networking

6 WikiLeaks: Citizen as Journalist, Journalist as Citizen

7 ‘The Global Village of Images’

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgements

With the benefit of hindsight, I realise that my initial thoughts about citizen witnessing first began to take shape when preparing a chapter for an edited collection I was putting together with Barbie Zelizer at the time, Journalism After September 11. Our difficulty in finding someone willing and able to research and write a chapter about the online news coverage of that day’s atrocities – rather few journalism scholars being focused on the internet in 2001 – meant that I ended up volunteering to try to meet the challenge myself. In the course of examining how major news sites responded to the crisis, I found myself equally intrigued by the extraordinary reportorial contributions made by ordinary citizens. Variously described as ‘amateur newsies’, ‘instant reporters’ or ‘personal journalists’ and the like, their first-hand, eyewitness accounts, photographs and video footage provided early evidence that a profoundly important transition was underway. Not only was journalism on the internet rapidly transfiguring into journalism of the internet, longstanding principles of news reporting – and with them familiar assumptions about who was entitled to bear witness to tragic events – were being redefined with startling implications for the brave new world of digital media.

Over the years since, my research on citizen contributions to online news slowly began to coalesce into the mode of enquiry pursued on these pages, helped along the way by many kind people. I am especially grateful to my colleagues in the Media School at Bournemouth University (a special thank-you to members of the Centre for Journalism and Communication Research, particularly Einar Thorsen for his eleventh-hour reading of a penultimate draft), as well as to our students – their lively engagements with this book’s ideas have improved them considerably. It has also been my good fortune to be a visiting professor at several universities during this period, enabling me to try out new arguments and to benefit from invigorating debate. My sincere thanks to Christine Daymon and Nigel de Bussy at Curtin University, Karin Becker at Stockholm University, Kerstin Engström at Umeå University, and Jacqui Ewart at Griffith University for their warm hospitality. I am pleased to acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) and the Swedish Research Council for related projects, respectively. At Polity, Andrea Drugan and her colleagues have been superb, and I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewers of both the initial book proposal and the first draft of the manuscript for their perceptive comments. Leigh Mueller’s copy-editing was exemplary. And, finally, last to be acknowledged, but first in heartfelt appreciation, Cindy and Geoff.

1

‘Accidental Journalism’

What does it mean to bear witness in a moment of crisis? Most journalists have been formally trained to be dispassionately impartial when documenting what they see and hear under such circumstances, recognising as they do that the truth-value of their chosen rendering of facts will be at stake. For the ordinary individual, however, any sense of journalism is likely to be far from their mind, should they find themselves unexpectedly caught-up in disturbing events rapidly unfolding around them. Nevertheless, they may well strive to engage in a form of eyewitness reportage, perhaps using their mobile telephone to capture an image, generate a video, or craft a tweet in order to record and share their personal experience of what is happening in front of them. Such spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment responses, so often motivated by a desire to connect with others, go to the heart of current debates about citizen journalism, one of the most challenging issues confronting the news media today. To help set the scene for this book’s discussion, and thereby highlight several themes to be explored, we first turn to a rather intriguing example of what will be characterised as ‘citizen witnessing’ for our purposes on the pages ahead.

The arrival of a low-flying helicopter above Sohaib Athar’s quiet suburban neighbourhood in a small town in northern Pakistan was unusual, not least because it was the middle of the night. Unusual enough to warrant a tweet, in any case, so he promptly reported ‘Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)’ on Twitter. Self-described on his @ReallyVirtual account as an ‘IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops’, Athar typically tweeted about his daily concerns, ranging from his family to views on technology, politics and coffee (he and his wife manage a café) in the hope that his musings would be appreciated by his 750 or so followers. On this occasion, though, he decided to share his growing irritation with the helicopter’s noisy intrusion when to his astonishment a sudden explosion cut through the night. ‘A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S’, he tweeted. Before he knew it, he began processing further points of information rapidly emerging from his online network of friends in the local community.

In the tweets that followed, Athar relayed assertions – gathered primarily from friends on Facebook – that more than one helicopter was involved, they appeared to be non-Pakistani, the explosion sounded like one of them being ‘shot down near the Bilal Town area’ (a link to a Facebook map pinpointed the area), and a ‘gunfight’ had erupted that ‘lasted perhaps 4–5 minutes’. Whether fact or rumour, he could not be certain. ‘Report from a taxi driver: The army has cordoned off the crash area and is conducting door-to-door search in the surrounding[s]’, he added, followed soon after by ‘Report from a sweeper: A family also died in the crash, and one of the helicopter riders got away and is now being searched for.’ Little did Athar know at the time that his efforts to offer a first-hand description of what he aptly termed in one tweet a ‘complicated situation’ would reverberate around the planet in the hours to come.

Elsewhere on Twitter, rumours were swirling about an impromptu White House press conference being organised, with much of the conjecture revolving around the possibility that Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafihad been captured or killed. Official confirmation that a televised statement was being prepared appeared at 9.45 p.m. when White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer tweeted ‘POTUS to address the nation tonight at 10.30pm eastern time’ (POTUS being President of the United States, Barack Obama) on Sunday, 1 May 2011. Speculation regarding possible reasons for an announcement intensified even further before Keith Urbahn, a former political aide to ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, passed along a tip at 10:25 pm from an inside source, stating: ‘So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.’ Urbahn promptly cautioned against getting ahead of the facts, tweeting: ‘Don’t know if its true, but let’s pray it is’ and ‘Ladies, gents, let’s wait to see what the President says. Could be misinformation or pure rumor.’ Evidently, within minutes, anonymous sources at the Pentagon and the White House began contacting major news organisations with the same information, leading the ABC, CBS and NBC television networks to interrupt their programming with the news (Stelter, 2011). When, at 11.35 p.m., more than an hour after Urbahn’s unconfirmed tweet, Obama addressed his television audience, he announced ‘justice has been done’ in response to Osama bin Laden’s responsibility for orchestrating the vicious attack of September 11, 2001. ‘The death of Bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat Al Qaeda …’, he stated; ‘So his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity’ (Obama, 2011).

While media commentaries focused on assessing the wider implications of the US intervention for national security, questions lingered regarding how the news had come to light in the first place. Proving particularly contentious, in the eyes of some, was whether Twitter’s role signalled a victory for social media networking over established media where covering breaking news was concerned. Amongst those heralding the microblogging service’s ‘scoop’ were those enthusing about how it was transforming into the preferred medium for ‘people in the know’ to bypass traditional channels altogether. Others, closely scrutinising how the process proceeded so swiftly, emphasised the converging factors involved. ‘Keith Urbahn wasn’t the first to speculate Bin Laden’s death, but he was the one who gained the most trust from the network’, computer analyst Gilad Lotan (2011) pointed out; ‘And with that, the perfect situation unfolded, where timing, the right social-professional networked audience, along with a critically relevant piece of information led to an explosion of public affirmation of his trustworthiness.’ Here it seems likely that Urbahn’s preceived credibility was due to the presumption that Rumsfeld had supplied the information in the first place, when in actuality Urbahn had been called by a ‘connected network TV news producer’ (as described in a later tweet) hoping to gain his insight into Rumsfeld’s reaction to the raid’s outcome.

Interestingly, where Sohaib Athar was concerned, he readily acknowledged that several hours had passed before he realised – courtesy of a tweet making the connection – that he had been documenting aspects of the US military’s top-secret strike some 250 yards from where he lived. ‘Uh oh, now I’m the guy who live-blogged the Osama raid without knowing it’, he tweeted. Deluged by requests from journalists for an interview, he was modest about his achievements: ‘I am JUST a tweeter, awake at the time of the crash. Not many twitter users in Abbottabad, these guys are more into facebook. That’s all.’

Twitter’s ‘CNN moment’

Others weighing into the debate over the journalistic role of social media made a much stronger argument for its importance. ‘Twitter just had its CNN moment’, Matt Rosoff (2011) of Business Insider boldly declared in the immediate aftermath.

Remember CNN when the Gulf War started in 1990? Before then, it was watched mostly by obsessive news followers – people in finance and government, political science professors, insomniacs. Then Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and suddenly CNN was everywhere. Even in bars.

That’s what’s going to happen with Twitter after tonight’s announcement that U.S. Special Forces killed Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, a Pakistani city about two hours from the capital Islamabad. (Rasoff, 2011)

In crediting Twitter with being ‘faster, more accurate, and more entertaining than any other news source out there’, Rosoff underlined how a perceived virtue in speed was redefining news priorities. Steve Myers (2011b) of The Poynter Institute appeared to concur to some extent, especially in light of how the number of Athar’s followers leapt from 750 to 86,000 within twenty-four hours. This suggested to him that the reason this unwitting ‘ear witness’ to bin Laden’s death became so influential so quickly was Twitter’s capacity to facilitate bridging networks, in this instance between those with Pakistani connections, on the one hand, and those with media connections, on the other. The emergent chain of information – consisting of overlapping social circles of like-minded tweeters sharing their thoughts and observations – served to turn ‘one man’s offhand comments about a helicopter in the middle of the night into an internationally known work of citizen journalism’, in Myers’s opinion.

Writing for SF Weekly’s blog, Dan Mitchell (2011) begged to differ. While conceding that Athar’s real-time tweets about the events may have temporarily made him a journalist ‘in a small way’, there was little evidence that his efforts actually mattered. ‘Wondering on Twitter why there are helicopters flying around your neighborhood isn’t journalism’, he argued; ‘The world learned that bin Laden had been assassinated after the U.S. government told several big news organizations that that would be the subject of Obama’s forthcoming announcement’ (Mitchell, 2011). Twitter’s value is in its role as a real-time headline service, in his view, with little prospect that its use will lead to the demise of traditional news media anytime soon. Myers (2011c), writing in response to Mitchell’s scepticism, stressed that Athar was a citizen journalist ‘because when he came across an unusual event, he acted in a journalistic manner’. More specifically, he pointed out that not only did Athar tell others about the event concerned, he answered questions from others seeking further details, acted as a conduit for information as he gathered it, identified whether claims were rumour or linked to sources (‘taxi driver’, ‘sweeper’ and so forth), shared links to accounts from local news sources, contributed to collective efforts to determine precisely what was occurring, and offered his own analysis. ‘Any one of these activities may simply amount to conversation among friends’, Myers maintained; ‘Taken together, it looks like journalism.’ Moreover, in the days following the raid, Athar used Twitter as a ‘distribution network’ to post photographs of the compound, near-empty Abbottabad streets (traffic having been shut down), and the media arriving on the scene to cover the story. All aspects considered, ‘Athar added to the body of knowledge. We know more about the raid, and about how people share information, because of him. That’s a good thing’, Myers concluded.

More than a passing dispute over semantics, then, thorny questions begin to emerge over the relative status to be granted to ‘accidental journalism’, as some perceive it, or the ad hoc sharing of impressions, opinions and observations of nominal significance, which others would insist citizen involvement in newsmaking recurrently represents. Still others would contend that it is a blending of the two that typically produces such remarkable forms of coverage, with those who played a pivotal part in bringing Athar’s real-time dispatches to the attention of major news organisations being a case in point.

Chris Applegate (2011), self-described on his personal blog as a ‘geek and wannabe polymath’, was widely credited with making the connection between Athar’s tweets about the helicopter above his neighbourhood and the bin Laden raid. As he later explained on his blog, Maha Rafi Atal, his journalist girlfriend, had shown him a retweet about a ‘low-flying heli’ in Abbottabad, which made him wonder whether anyone in Pakistan had been covering the raid as it unfolded. Using Google Realtime, he searched for tweets with the word ‘Abbottabad’ appearing prior to Obama’s speech, almost instantly discovering Athar’s reports. He promptly tweeted to his own followers: ‘Wow. Turns out at least one person, @ReallyVirtual, inadvertently liveblogged the raid in Abbottabad earlier today http://bit.ly/IU5b4s’, thereby playing a decisive part in breaking this dimension of the story for the world’s media.

In Applegate’s view, the ‘whole episode shows how transformative Twitter can be’, enabling someone like Athar to assume ‘the role of citizen journalist, becoming a correspondent of sorts’ as the news story developed:

The key thing that made Sohaib’s liveblogging from earlier in the day so compelling was that it was completely unwitting, mirroring our own disbelief that Bin Laden had been quietly residing in the Pakistani equivalent of Tunbridge Wells all these years, without any of us knowing. The story chimed perfectly with our own emotions. And because the story had been unwitting, it was also candid and honest, cutting through the hype and speculation that the 24-hour news stations were resorting to. (Applegate 2011)

Self-effacingly describing himself as ‘one small factor that sparked the process off’, Applegate also expressed his admiration for how Athar proceeded to engage in diverse forms of journalistic activity – conducting interviews, taking photographs, reporting on the mood in the town – as ‘the story matured and his fame rose’. Athar’s efforts, in his view, were ‘a far cry from the cynical caricature of Twitter as an echo chamber – a place where nothing new is said and everything is relentlessly retweeted’ (Applegate 2011).

Interestingly, Maha Rafi Atal (2011), a New York-based freelance journalist and Forbes blogger, responded to her boyfriend Applegate’s blog post. After adding a few further details about how she came to share with him the tweet that piqued his curiosity to investigate (crucial here, she points out, was how she happens to ‘sit at the intersection of two networks: the network of people who follow news on Pakistan, and the network of American journalists, media critics and wonks’), she offered her own views about Athar’s status as a citizen journalist. In her words:

At least for me, the power of Athar’s story was as a reminder that ‘war zones’ are also people’s homes. It brought to life the mundane details of daily life, and the poignant struggle of trying to live daily life – in Athar’s case, just to have a quiet work night – in one of the most dangerous and maddening countries on earth. As Athar told me when I interviewed him for Forbes, he moved to Abbottabad a few years ago from Lahore precisely to shield his family from the violence then engulfing the city.

She continued:

What we saw in his tweets was a man who had run from the madness only to have it running after him. What we witnessed was the moment he realized it had caught up with him. That tension between what people really care about in Pakistan and the violence that prevents them from moving on with their lives, the bitter irony of life there, is something I’ve written on often. Yet no matter how much reporting I do, it doesn’t cease to affect me emotionally. And when, after the news about bin Laden had broken, Athar realized what had happened, and began to receive an avalanche of requests from journalists, he tweeted, ‘Bin Laden is dead. I didn’t kill him. Please let me sleep now.’ For me, that’s an absolute punch to the gut. (Atal 2011)

Like Applegate, she proceeded to express her appreciation for the way Athar took on the role of citizen journalist under such trying circumstances. ‘I think this is very much the ideal of how social media and citizen journalism is meant to work’, she wrote; ‘Not everyone can grow into their new status as a one-person-broadcast-network with such speed and grace, which is why I’m so often skeptical of how it will evolve as a model, but Athar’s transformation is nothing short of a triumph’ (Atal 2011).

First-person reportage

In seeking to investigate the ways in which ordinary people find themselves compelled to engage in first-person reportage, the case study above usefully illuminates a number of issues warranting close and careful elucidation. To describe those involved as ‘citizen journalists’ may be advantageous in certain circumstances, in part by acknowledging that their actions are recognisable as journalistic activity, but such a label brings with it certain heuristic difficulties too. As we shall see, discourses of ‘citizen journalism’ reveal an array of virtues in the opinion of advocates striving to transform journalism by improving its civic contribution to public life – and conceal a multitude of sins in the eyes of critics intent on preserving what they perceive to be the integrity of professional practice – in complex, occasionally contradictory ways. This book’s engagement with one of its organising tenets, namely the imperative of witnessing, is intended as an intervention which is alert to the sharp pull of contrary claims and counter-claims.

Citizen journalism, for our purposes here, may be characterised as a type of first-person reportage in which ordinary individuals temporarily adopt the role of a journalist in order to participate in newsmaking, often spontaneously during a time of crisis, accident, tragedy or disaster when they happen to be present on the scene. Seen by some as an outgrowth of earlier forms of public or civic journalism, the term ‘citizen journalism’ gained currency in the immediate aftermath of the South Asian tsunami of December 2004, when news organisations found themselves in the awkward position of being largely dependent on ‘amateur’ reportage to tell the story of what had transpired on the ground. Despite its ambiguities, it was widely perceived to capture something of the countervailing ethos of the ordinary person’s capacity to bear witness, thereby providing commentators with a useful label to characterise an ostensibly new genre of reporting.

In the years since the tsunami, ‘citizen journalism’ has secured its place in the news professional’s vocabulary (for better or otherwise in the view of many news organisations), more often than not associated with relaying breaking news of significant events. It includes the provision of such diverse contributions as first-person eyewitness accounts, audio recordings, video footage, mobile or cell phone and digital camera photographs, and the like, typically shared online via email or through bulletin-boards, blogs, wikis, personal webpages and social networking sites. Described variously as ‘user-generated content’ as well as ‘grassroots journalism’, ‘open source journalism’, ‘participatory journalism’, ‘hyperlocal journalism’, ‘distributed journalism’ or ‘networked journalism’, amongst further alternatives, there is little doubt that it is decisively realigning traditional news reporting’s communicative priorities and protocols, sometimes in profound ways.

More often than not, efforts to formulate a productive line of enquiry appeal to a discourse of witnessing – in which terms such as ‘eyewitness’, ‘watcher’, ‘observer’, ‘bystander’, ‘onlooker’, ‘spectator’ and the like, tend to figure – to characterise citizens’ capacity to participate in newsmaking by sharing what they have seen, felt or heard at the scene. The intrinsic value of ‘being there’, on the ground, has been prized since the earliest days of crisis journalism. Viewed from the perspective of the news media, the capacity of the professional journalist to serve as a trustworthy, reliable witness in the heat of the moment – and also, crucially, to negotiate the terms delimiting the eyewitnessing of others – underpins the discursive legitimacy of first-hand reporting, for those who are there, as well as for those at a distance (for whom the ensuing coverage is likely to shape perceptions, possibly in a decisive manner). This is a formidable challenge, not least because eyewitnessing is as conditional as it is provisional, and, as such, fraught with difficulties. The authority of presence, a situational imbrication of ‘here and now’, is a precarious achievement, one always at risk of coming unravelled, such are the tensions besetting human understanding, interpretation and memory. Somewhat paradoxically, however, it is this invocation of eyewitness subjectivity that throws into crisp relief the codified strictures of journalistic impartiality. The proclaimed capacity of the journalistic gaze to be impersonal, detached and dispassionate in its purview is a tacit, yet telling, feature of the professional ethos.

Bearing witness

Time and again, examples of reportage emerge across the media-scape that put paid to easy, ready-made distinctions between professional objectivity and amateur subjectivity. The current humanitarian emergency in Syria is a case in point, albeit for harrowing reasons. News accounts with headlines such as ‘Journalist witnesses Syrian authorities torturing activists’ offer first-hand perspectives on what it means to put one’s life at risk to cover a story. Arrested in a Damascus café whilst working undercover for Channel 4 News, Sean McAllister was blindfolded and driven to a prison where he was held against his will.

I was placed on a seat in an empty room on my own. Outside I could hear beatings in a neighbouring room. People being slapped and wailing painfully as they were being whacked….

If they are not satisfied with the info, you would be brought out at three in the morning into the torture chamber and whipped with the cable […] It was so heavy, so awful, it must have broken bones and the howling, the noise of a human being hit with that is something that just, you know, you shiver and shake. You hear a sound that you’ve never heard before, I’ve never heard before. And I’ve seen people dead. And I’ve seen people dying. And I’ve seen people decapitated, but this sound, hearing a man cry, is just like, awful, there’s nothing to compare it with. (cited in Channel 4 News, 2011b)

McAllister, to his credit, reveals himself to be a vulnerable human being, rather than reasserting the pretence of being a dispassionate relayer of cold, hard facts with robot-like precision. ‘My biggest trauma, nightmare’, he added, ‘was looking at how they were treating their own people and imagining that that could be my future down there in a dark cell, indefinitely, without any idea of when you’re going to be released.’

This type of first-person testimony provides the reader with distressing insights, the emotive affectivity of which being difficult, if not impossible, to convey within the time-worn conventions of scrupulously objective reporting. Journalists, when asked, will acknowledge the dangers, but typically insist that they have an obligation to bear witness, to be their audience’s eyes and ears in situations where individuals less determined to seek out the truth would do well to avoid.1 Witnessing, few would dispute, is the lynchpin of good reporting. If journalists behave most of the time like ‘insatiable voyeurs’, to borrow a phrase from Roger Cohen (2009b) of the New York Times, this is not to diminish what is a defining characteristic. ‘In the 24/7 howl of partisan pontification, and the scarcely less-constant death knell din surrounding the press’, he contends, ‘a basic truth gets lost: that to be a journalist is to bear witness.’ The rest, he adds, ‘is no more than ornamentation’.

Foreign correspondent Marie Colvin’s reputation for bearing witness in the world’s trouble-spots earned her considerable respect amongst fellow journalists. Instantly recognisable because of the black eye patch she wore, having lost her left eye to grenade shrapnel in the Sri Lankan civil war, she was in Syria for the Sunday Times in February 2012. In what proved to be her final words, she wrote on a private Facebook page for journalists: ‘In Baba Amr. Sickening, cannot understand how the world can stand by and I should be hardened by now. Watched a baby die today. Shrapnel, doctors could do nothing. His little tummy just heaved and heaved until he stopped. Feeling helpless. As well as cold! Will keep trying to get out the information.’

Colvin was killed alongside French photojournalist Remi Ochlik when a rocket hit the house in which they had taken refuge during an onslaught of shelling targeting civilians in Baba Amr, a suburban neighbourhood of Homs. She had been the only journalist from a British newspaper in the besieged city, having surreptitiously slipped over the border from Lebanon on a smuggler’s route used to transport food and medical supplies, such was her determination to document the unfolding crisis. ‘Covering a war means going to places torn by chaos, destruction and death … and trying to bear witness’, she had said during a memorial service two years earlier; ‘It means trying to find the truth in a sandstorm of propaganda when armies, tribes or terrorists clash. […] Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice’ (Colvin, 2010).

In the ensuing news coverage of Colvin’s death, references to the importance of bearing witness featured prominently, as signalled in the following headlines:

Marie Colvin: Foreign Correspondent Lauded for Her Courage as She Bore Witness to Wars Across the World (The Guardian, 23 February 2012)

Recalling a Journalist Who Died Bearing Witness to a Siege (The New York Times, 23 February 2012)

Colvin’s Death Highlights Risk of Bearing Witness to War (The Globe and Mail, Canada, 24 February 2012)

The Death of a Witness (Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February 2012)

Evidence continues to mount that Colvin, Ochlik and the other journalists in the same building, which had been serving as a makeshift press centre, were deliberately targeted by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime (Nicolas Sarkozy, the then French President, contended they were ‘assassinated’ in the attack) to prevent their reporting of the atrocities perpetrated on civilians. ‘They are killing with impunity … I should stay and write what I can to expose what is happening here’, Colvin had written in an email sent three days before she was killed, all too aware her life was in peril. ‘Nothing seemed to deter her’, John Witherow (2012), Editor of the Sunday Times, observed in a note circulated to colleagues informing them of her death, while Anthony Loyd (2012) of TheTimes described her as ‘the foremost champion among us, a woman who was the embodiment of all that was brave and wise and good in journalism’.2

Possible truths

The journalist as ‘people’s witness’, steadfastly committed to eyewitness fidelity to what he or she saw and heard, will not waver when ‘bearing witness of human actuality to those who could not actually be there’ (Inglis, 2002: 3). Philosophical nuances notwithstanding, principles of truth, fact and verification have long served as news reporting’s guiding tenets. In highlighting the centrality of witnessing, however, it is vital not to overlook the degree of scepticism journalists routinely put into effect when processing truth-claims. Experience tells them individuals on the scene, despite their best intentions, may be offering a less than accurate recollection of what they have seen or heard. Under duress, memories can be faulty, lines of vision obscured, the significance of events misinterpreted. Ensuing testimonies may be unconsciously compromised to the point that they are of little journalistic value or, even worse, become inadvertently misleading. When truth-claims otherwise seem dependable, wary journalists nonetheless strive to double-check their veracity, mindful that there are occasions when individuals have much to gain by deliberately falsifying statements. The skills necessary to sift through eyewitness assertions to determine relative trustworthiness are a source of pride, hard-won in the face of constant pressure to ensure a news story will not come unravelled should declared facts become the subject of dispute.

Journalists utilise a number of tactics to narrativise truth-claims so as to protect their reputation, or at least minimise possible risks to their proclaimed reportorial integrity. Quotation marks around an individual’s words, for example, serve as an accustomed cue or prompt to the reader that the evidential basis for a truth-claim resides with the individual cited as proffering it – in contrast with a statement that has been paraphrased. Implicitly, their use in the news account represents a distancing device, enabling journalists to differentiate their authorial voice from the speech of the source, should the words of the latter eventually prove unreliable. As such, it amounts to one of several pragmatic (even defensive) strategies codified within the strictures of impartial reporting, an epistemological anchoring of facticity that journalism shares with other genres of discourse – in particular legal discourse – where standards of verification in witness testimony feature prominently.3 Journalism’s respect for tacit rules when processing contingent evidence (including the presumed truth of imagery) ordinarily becomes visible only when they have been violated; that is to say, when witnesses are revealed to be lying, grinding an axe or spinning the apparent facts in a particular way to advance their own agenda.

More typically, the inscription of witnessing in news reporting is much more subtle, effectively blurring the journalist’s capacity in this regard with that of the sources he or she has selected to give it expression. Witnessing necessarily involves a complex process of mediation, despite rhetorical claims about ‘facts speaking for themselves’ in journalistic parlance. Indeed, Barbie Zelizer (2007) suggests that the most salient feature of eyewitnessing – namely, ‘its ability to convince publics of the distant experience or event in a seemingly unmediated style’ – goes to the heart of its centrality to newsgathering (2007: 424). In tracking the evolution of ‘eyewitnessing’ as a keyword of journalistic practice in the US, she helpfully discerns four stages in its development as a means to validate certain preferred norms in the accounting of reality collectively recognised by members of the journalistic community to be appropriate (see also Zelizer, 2002b, 2010). In the first period, broadly aligned with journalism emerging as a recognisable craft centuries ago, the idea of the eyewitness report appears as a means to express personal experience of public events, Zelizer maintains. Typically, such reports were furnished by ‘nonjournalistic individuals’, whose personal accounts tended to emphasise ‘romanticized, overtly subjective and stylistically elaborate features’ in keeping with the highly emotive – and rather colourful – tenor of most chronicles of the time. The second period, underway by the mid-1800s, signals the expansion of this role to include a more diverse array of participants, not least journalists themselves, self-consciously acting as eyewitnesses. The style of their reports, Zelizer argues, ‘became more concrete and reality-driven’ – that is, more reliable in their rendering of facts in response to public scepticism about their trustworthiness.

Eyewitnessing’s closer association with realism was not without its problems, but increasingly it was being regarded as connoting the mark of authenticity as a value in its own right – news photography, in particular, offering ‘an alternative way of claiming eyewitness status that offset the limitations of verbal narratives’ (2007: 417). The expansion of technology in the early twentieth century characterises a third period, when alternative kinds of eyewitnessing are made possible to lend credibility and authenticity to a report’s assertions by virtue of the journalist’s enhanced capacity to represent on-site presence. By the end of the Second World War, Zelizer maintains, ‘eyewitnessing had become a default setting for good reportage’, with news organisations speaking of it ‘as if it had almost a mythic status’ (2007: 421). And, fourthly, the contemporary period is discernible on the basis of the journalist’s absence, that is, his or her frequent replacement by technological conveyance (where forms of ‘unmanned’ live coverage have ‘moved style, subjectivity and person from eyewitnessing, leaving it seemingly unedited and disembodied’), on the one hand, or by the private citizen acting as a ‘nonconventional’ journalist performing the work of eyewitnessing, on the other. Concerns about issues such as reliability, accuracy, verifiability, even excessive graphicness, are not being adequately offset, in turn, by journalistic mitigation, including contextualisation, the way they were before. To the extent eyewitnessing is being ‘outsourced’, Zelizer fears, it risks undermining journalism’s cultural authority in public life.

While there is little doubt each of these periods would reward closer critique, here they usefully accentuate the importance of attending to the evolving, socially contingent nature of the imperatives underwriting witnessing in a manner sensitive to historical specificities. Delving into these matters it soon becomes apparent that questions regarding precisely what this process of witnessing entails, especially where online journalism is concerned, invite a reconsideration of the conceptual vocabulary typically brought to bear in discussions of news reportage and its perceived influence on the perceptions of distant readers, listeners and viewers. This, in a nutshell, is our principal task at hand.

‘A walking eye on the world’

To question the conception of citizenship implied in citizen witnessing is to invite a lively debate. A host of contending perspectives are likely to surface regarding how familiar notions of personal rights and duties are being recast in everyday contexts, particularly in light of what are increasingly interconnected, interdependent relations of communicative power indicative of what Manuel Castells (2009) terms the ‘global network society’ (see chapter 5). Rather tellingly, the news media typically elude sustained attention in otherwise relevant conceptual models, at least beyond the general recognition that the role they play in shaping how their audiences collectively recognise and respond to distant crisis events – such as accidents, disasters, conflicts or wars – warrants greater attention than it has typically received to date. Journalism’s relationship to citizenship, its capacity to foster, enrich and nurture meaningful civic engagement interweaving the local and the global, seldom comes to the fore.

That said, however, popular discourses about journalism within democratic cultures recurrently throw longstanding concerns about this relationship into sharp relief. Journalists may find themselves blamed for failing to promote citizenship in the interest of furthering societal objectives, even though few of them would likely regard it as their responsibility to perform this obligation in the first place. Related criticisms holding them culpable for perpetuating a democratic deficit, whereby passive, acquiescent citizens are discouraged from taking an active interest in their own governance, will be similarly dismissed as unreasonable. Journalists tend to be uncomfortable with the idea that they should be educating audiences, preferring instead to focus on informational relay in accordance with professional norms of impartiality, fairness and balance.

Still, when set in relation to the larger political economy of the crises confronting news organisations struggling to re-profile their news provision in order to survive, let alone prosper, in a digital era, these criticisms become all the more acute. At a time when many newsrooms are under intense financial pressure to trim expenditure wherever possible, it is all too often the case that public service values are reframed on more modest terms where civic commitments are concerned. The investment vital for investigative journalism, in particular, is a luxury difficult to justify in the eyes of some managers coping with seemingly inexorable market pressures, especially when certain other types of news will be more ‘cost-effective’ to produce, and more likely to catch the public’s wandering eye (and that of potential advertisers). As a result, the very integrity of news reporting charged with advancing citizenship in the public interest risks being compromised, many fear, when the necessary time and resources are in such short supply in so many newsrooms.

Discussions of journalism’s civic commitments need to be situated within this larger political-economic context. High-quality news reporting is, in a word, expensive, leaving some news organisations buckling under the strain of supporting it. Some are collapsing altogether, while others are subjecting their employees to ‘reorganisation’, ‘downsizing’, ‘layoffs’, ‘cutbacks’ and the like. News and editorial posts are often being ‘concentrated’, with remaining staff members compelled to ‘multi-task’ as they adopt greater ‘flexibility’ with regard to their salary and working conditions. ‘Converged’ content is being ‘repackaged’, a polite way of saying that its quantity – and, too often, quality – is shrinking as ‘efficiencies’ are imposed (Allan, 2012b; Boczkowski, 2010; Bruns, 2005; Domingo and Paterson, 2011; Fenton, 2010; Friend and Singer, 2007; McChesney and Pickard, 2011; McNair, 2011; Meikle and Redden, 2011). Conventional journalist-source dynamics are similarly reforming, in part due to stop-gap measures taken to blunt the sharper edges of cutbacks where employment in the newsroom is concerned. These measures have led to the increasing reliance on PR press releases in the guise of news (aptly described by Davies (2008) as ‘churnalism’), as well as to ever greater emphasis placed on the contributions to newsmaking offered by members of the public. The appropriation of the latter, typically characterised as ‘user-generated content’ in firm denial of its journalistic qualities, has become so systemised into bureaucratic protocols that it is an almost routine feature of newsgathering. Despite persistent difficulties with verification and authentication, processing this material is relatively affordable, and its appeal for audiences is readily apparent – factors that make it all but irresistible in the eyes of those otherwise defining the scope of their news provision on the basis of bottom-line profit maximisation.

And yet, these strategies of containment – ensuring ‘the audience’ knows its place and acts accordingly – consistently fail to hold fast. Diverse forms of public participation in newsmaking are flourishing as never before, neatly sidestepping the mainstream media’s professional gatekeepers striving to mediate or, more to the point, regulate and monetise their contributions within preferred institutional boundaries. Pessimistic appraisals of the decline, if not outright death, of inquisitive, vigorous news reporting worthy of the name are being readily countered by bold assertions about the promise of citizen-centred reporting to usher in grassroots alternatives. Such ‘random acts of journalism’ (Lasica, 2003) performed by ‘people formerly known as the audience’ (Rosen, 2006) underscore a transformative shift journalists acknowledge yet remain reluctant to fully embrace: citizens are doing it for themselves.

‘Armed with cellphones, BlackBerries or iPhones’, Don Peat (2010) of the Toronto Sun observes, ‘the average Joe is now a walking eye on the world, a citizen journalist, able to take a photo, add a caption or a short story and upload it to the Internet for all their friends, and usually everyone else, to see.’ Noteworthy here is the phrase ‘a walking eye on the world’ for its conception of witnessing as everyday observation, as well as the emphasis placed on the compulsion to share within a social network of like-minded individuals simultaneously open to the wider webscape. Still, the relationship of equivalence posited between the ordinary citizen engaged in bearing witness (‘the average Joe’ or Jill ‘armed’ with a mobile telephone to keep an ‘eye on the world’) and the ‘citizen journalist’ is problematic. More than a question of semantics, the person inclined to self-identify as someone engaging in a journalistic role – perhaps an independent blogger, photographer or videographer – is likely to differentiate themselves from those who just happen to be nearby when a potentially newsworthy incident happens.

Having the presence of mind to raise a camera-equipped mobile to capture the scene, for example, may well be a laudable achievement under the circumstances, but this represents a different level of engagement. ‘Let’s face it, most of the people who capture this imagery have jobs to work, errands to run, houses to maintain and families to take care of’, crowdsourcing analyst Eric Taubert (2012) maintains. ‘If asked, they don’t consider themselves citizen journalists’, he adds, although they will often welcome the opportunity to have their imagery shared with a wider audience. ‘Great content captured by smartphone-wielding citizens can die on the vine without ever being seen’, he adds, ‘unless that content finds its way into the hands of journalists who know how to wrap a story around it, fact-check it and place it into the distribution chain.’ In other words, unless the citizen in question is prepared to assume this responsibility for themselves – which, admittedly is getting easier to do by the day via digital media – they will likely turn to a news organisation to perform it on their behalf.

Accordingly, in formulating an approach to help clarify the relative degree of personal investment in citizen journalism, our attention will focus on the varying levels or registers of witnessing at its heart. In attending to the nuances of these gradations, we shall resist the temptation – in Taubert’s (2012) words – to throw the term ‘citizen journalism’ on ‘the trash heap of inflammatory archaic jargon’ in favour of narrowing its definitional remit to advantage. Here I hasten to acknowledge from the outset, however, the impracticalities associated with attempts to generate a singular, unifying framework. The desire to secure a general theory may be understandable, but is rather unlikely to produce insights of lasting value. Theory-building benefits from proceeding with a more modest set of objectives, I would suggest, in the first instance by examining ostensibly obvious, taken-for-granted features of the terrain with a view to identifying and critiquing incipient points of tension, gaps and inconsistencies. Whether such fault-lines portend to fracture the foundations of boundaries between professional and citizen witnessing or, alternatively, to realign them on more sustainable terms is a question that will guide our mode of enquiry.

This book

My choice of title, Citizen witnessing: revisioning journalism in times of crisis, underscores the stakes for this project as a real-world intervention. In striving to introduce and elaborate ‘citizen witnessing’ as a key concept in journalism, I shall engage with pressing theoretical concerns in a manner alert to exigent professional interests. Our discussion’s scope is limited to a certain selection of related themes, but it is my hope that it will serve to encourage others to pursue numerous avenues equally worthy of exploration highlighted on these pages.

In taking as its principal focus the reportorial imperative of witnessing in online news coverage of crisis events, this book signals its departure from more familiar approaches to citizen journalism more generally.4 In recent years the term ‘media witnessing’ has emerged as a way to describe how digital technologies are transforming this capacity to bear witness, encouraging a number of productive lines of investigation. Definitions tend to vary depending upon disciplinary priorities, but in its most general sense, as Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski (2009b) pointed out, the term refers to ‘the witnessing performed in, by, and through the media. It is about the systematic and ongoing reporting of the experiences and realities of distant others to mass audiences’ (2009a: 1). Here they further specify the term’s remit by suggesting it strives to capture simultaneously ‘the appearance of witnesses in media reports, the possibility of media themselves bearing witness, and the positioning of media audiences as witnesses to depicted events’ (2009a: 1). In the case of a television news report, for example, it ‘may depict witnesses to an event, bear witness to that event, and turn viewers into witnesses all at the same time’ (2009a: 1). This tripartite distinction deserves further scrutiny for reasons I will explore below, but here we note the theoretical – and journalistic – concerns it highlights provide an impetus for research to move beyond the scope of more traditional concepts utilised in analyses of media effectivity.

My primary aim in the course of this book’s discussion is to discern a conceptual basis for formulating an alternative perspective, one intended to help to facilitate efforts to recast prevailing forms of social exclusion endemic to the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomies that tend to permeate Western news media reporting concerned with crisis events. More specifically, this book will offer an evaluative appraisal of diverse attempts to think through the journalistic mediation of witnessing with a view to assessing, in turn, certain wider implications for research investigating ordinary citizens’ impromptu involvement and participation. In the course of this discussion, I shall elaborate the concept of ‘citizen witnessing’ as one possible way forward to negotiate the conceptual territory fiercely lit by clashing assertions over whether journalism will thrive or perish with ever-greater public involvement in news making. While the difficulties are formidable, they are not insurmountable. I believe that journalism’s public service assurances may be imagined anew in light of the capacity of citizen witnessing to enhance democratic cultures. In meeting this challenge of innovation, journalism will benefit by securing new opportunities to reconnect with its audiences in a manner at once more transparent and accountable, while at the same time encouraging a more openly inclusive news culture committed to greater dialogue, deliberation and debate.5

Beginning in chapter 2, the evolving nature of this increasingly challenging relationship – that is, between the journalist as professional observer and the ordinary citizen engaged in first-hand, embodied forms of truth-telling – will be examined in order to bring to light issues central to current debates about journalism’s wider role within a democracy. To this end, this chapter adopts a historical perspective, in the first instance to draw out differing conceptions of the impartially objective journalist as a trustworthy eyewitness. Next, we trace the contours of an emergent debate over journalism’s social responsibilities, most notably the contrary argu ments put forth by journalist Walter Lippmann and philosopher John Dewey, respectively, in the 1920s. It is ‘altogether unthinkable that a society like ours’, Lippmann maintained, ‘should remain forever dependent upon untrained accidental witnesses’, a claim which Dewey – as if in anticipation of today’s citizen journalist – sought to refute.

My intention from chapter 3 onwards is to reverse the emphases of scholarly studies focusing on the realm of professional news reporting by bringing to the fore ‘amateur’ contributions to breaking, first-to-the-scene news, paying close attention to issues of form, practice and epistemology. Following a discussion of the importance of witnessing for the very integrity of news reporting (illustrated with reference to journalists such as Anna Politkovskaya and Wilfred Burchett), two formative precedents of online citizen witnessing will be examined in detail: specifically, Abraham Zapruder’s 8mm ‘home movie’ footage of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the ‘amateur camcorder video’ of Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles police officers in 1991. The latter portion of this chapter, in turn, will pinpoint several ways in which the rise of the internet as a news platform has contributed to the redefinition of journalism – and thus who can lay claim to the social authority of journalistic witnessing where crisis reporting is concerned.

Chapter 4 engages with a set of issues which often tend to be overlooked in research studies of citizen journalism. Having briefly traced the emergence of varied conceptions of the figure of the witness over time, attention is devoted to the capacity of journalism – television news, in particular – to privilege subjunctive forms of witnessing in which the suffering of distant others risks engendering traumatic responses. Media imagery, in particular, draws us into a positionality of witnessing, where our apparent complicity in what is rendered visible in front of the camera becomes undeniable. ‘We know about genocide; we know about the calculation of death in millions’, John Ellis (2000) maintains. ‘We know about famine and absolute poverty. We know because we have seen the images and heard the sounds which convey them’, which makes it impossible for us to claim ignorance as a defence (2000: 9–10). In order to consider how social media in the hands of ordinary citizens are transforming these more familiar dynamics, the chapter examines citizen contributions to the reporting of the Mumbai attacks in November 2008. It was during this crisis that the journalistic significance of Twitter for breaking news became readily apparent, signalling the onset of new forms of citizen witnessing.

Manuel Castells’s (2007, 2011) conception of ‘mass self-communication’ in the ‘global network society’ informs chapter 5’s exploration of young people’s use of witnessing strategies via social media to articulate protest and dissent regarding state power. Several examples – including the Greek student rebellion following the police shooting of a fifteen-year-old, the killing of Neda Agha-Solton who was protesting against government repression in Iran (mobile-telephone footage of which making it ‘probably the most widely witnessed death in human history’, Krista Mahr (2009) of Time magazine argued), the social havoc of the London riots, the Occupy Wall Street campaign and the incidents culminating in the Arab Spring – feature in the analysis. An observation made by the Al Jazeera (2011b) network regarding the latter uprisings applies to each of these incidents to varying degrees, namely that ‘Many of these citizens risked their own personal safety as they recorded the events unfolding around them.’ In so doing, ‘the result was often iconic images that have come to symbolise the Arab Spring, a process many analysts speculate would have taken a very different course were it not for the images that captivated the world’.

A further dimension of citizen witnessing, namely the role of the whistle-blower in investigative journalism, is brought to light in chapter 6. The controversial website WikiLeaks is centred for close examination, particularly with respect to the alternative ethos of witnessing that its founder, Julian Assange (2006), advocates: ‘Everytime we witness an act that we feel to be unjust and do not act’, he argues, ‘we become a party to injustice.’ This chapter evaluates several of WikiLeaks’s reportorial interventions in this light, each of them bringing to public attention documents provided by a whistle-blower intent on advancing an efficacious form of witnessing as a progressive form of civic engagement. WikiLeaks’s alternative conception of citizen-centred ‘scientific’ journalism will be assessed, with particular attention given to the top-secret Afghanistan war logs posted in 2010. The ensuing controversy sparked wide-ranging debate about the prescribed ideals of professional reporting, as well as its capacity to hold power to account in a manner consistent with the public interest.

Chapter 7 brings the discussion to a close, drawing together a number of themes informing the preceding chapters while, at the same time, seeking to sharpen this enquiry further by examining citizen witnessing during the Arab Spring, in general, and the conflict in Libya, in particular. With respect to the latter, the significance of graphic mobile-telephone footage of captured leader Muammar Gaddafi immediately before and after the moment of his execution is evaluated, primarily with regard to the ethical implications the use of this eyewitness imagery posed for news organisations caught in a quandary over what was appropriately newsworthy. In a ‘pix or it didn’t happen’ era, journalistic decisions regarding the apposite mediation of grisly images risk being subjected to intense criticism, causing searching questions to be asked about the setting of normative limits over what distant audiences will be allowed to see – answers to which, I believe, will prove to be of vital importance for future initiatives in citizen newsmaking.

By its end, then, it is hoped this book will succeed in making a compelling case for the continued development of the concept of citizen witnessing for journalism research.

2

The Journalist as Professional Observer

Even the most sincere, dedicated eyewitness cannot offer a ‘naïve picture of the scene’ keeping apart opinion and observation, Walter Lippmann wrote in Public opinion (1922), a book offering an incisive critique of news reporting at the time, and one that continues to resonate today. ‘Of any public event that has wide effects’, he maintained, ‘we see at best only a phase and an aspect.’ The nature of the event in question will be necessarily transfigured in the course of relaying its apparent facts to others. ‘A report is the joint product of the knower and known, in which the rôle of the observer is always selective and usually creative’, Lippmann added; ‘The facts we see depend on where we are placed, and the habits of our eyes’ (1922: 53–4).