All Blog Posts from Public Eye

In what is beginning to feel like a monthly ritual from some part of the world, we have another government-sanctioned media blackout, this time in Pakistan (again), where President General Pervez Musharraf has imposed emergency rule.

According to the AFP, Pakistan police raided the country’s biggest selling newspaper to make sure they didn’t put out a special edition on the crackdown:

Police on Monday raided a printing press belonging to Pakistan's biggest-selling newspaper group amid tough curbs on the media imposed under the state of emergency, officials said.

They stormed the Karachi premises of Awam, a sister publication of Jang group, following reports it was bringing out a special supplement on the emergency imposed by President Pervez Musharraf at the weekend, they said.

A government official in Karachi said that under emergency rules, the evening newspaper is not supposed to publish any special supplements, and police went to check that the restriction had not been violated.

This tactic is part of a wider campaign against the media in the country, as reported by the Washington Post:

Efforts to mount a nationwide campaign against Musharraf are likely to be hurt by the crackdown, particularly the continuing blackout of independent television stations, which had become a major catalyst for anti-Musharraf protests earlier in the year. "If you don't have television, you don't have crowds," news anchor Kashif Abbasi said.

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There has been some debate over the riots that followed the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as French president and how significant they actually are. The riots have been covered by mainstream media outlets, but if you are looking for reports from citizen journalists, you're somewhat out of luck. That's because, as Matthew Sheffield notes, only professional journalists can legally broadcast the riots:

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.

The law – which was proposed by Sarkozy when he was Minister of the Interior and went into effect in March – grew out of the rise of something called "happy slapping." That's when "a violent attack is filmed by an accomplice, typically with a camera phone, for the amusement of the attacker's friends," according to Peter Sayer of the IDG News Service.

Suppression of free speech? Charles Johnson thinks so. But the rise of citizen journalism can be problematic: As I noted last week, the presence of self-identified citizen journalists, some of whom were also protesters, may have contributed to the police's decision to beat journalists at the L.A. immigration riots.

One of the most striking moments in the television coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre came early in the day yesterday, when CNN aired cell phone footage from Tech student Jamal Albarghouti. It wasn't so much the images we saw as the sound we heard – gunfire from inside Norris Hall, which, as the New York Times reports, Albarghouti captured while lying on the ground at the orders of responding police officers.

The ethical questions that come with soliciting content from regular citizens in situations like this are reflected in the quote at the end of the Times story. “Stay out of harm’s way,” CNN anchor Don Lemon told Tech students. “But send us your pictures and video.” Part of Albarghouti's reward for sending his video to CNN's “I-Reports,” the section of the site that solicits content from outside the organization, was having his name plastered across the screen as CNN repeatedly showed the clip. (CBS News, by the way, has been soliciting video and photos as well, though none have made it on the air or Web site.) Watching CNN yesterday, staffers in the CBSNews.com newsroom commented that the video might help Albarghouti land a job.

As the Albarghouti video illustrates, ordinary citizens can have real incentives to get compelling material of dangerous situations and send them to news outlets. But will they always make the right determination when it comes to keeping themselves safe?

Journalists who face dangerous situations, such as reporting from a war zone, can assess the risks going in – and, even then, they aren't always safe. In many respects, the decisions regular citizens make when covering something like yesterday's incident are more difficult, since they have little time for reflection and little past experience to rely on. I hope we don't ever see a situation where a bystander, eager to cover an event like this, puts himself in harms way and comes to regret it.

Saddam Spot: The spread of the Saddam hanging video, says Tim Luckhurst, proves that news editors have lost control of the news agenda. "From the moment the explicit footage appeared on Anwarweb.net, traditional editorial processes were redundant. No editor decided who could witness this tawdry spectacle. Questions of taste were left to viewers as the shaky but powerful images spread via the file-sharing websites YouTube, Google Video and Revver." For new-media enthusiasts, he adds, "the fact that amateur film from a mobile telephone set the global news agenda shows citizen journalism has come of age." As we noted last week, CBS News refused to show the video since it violated network standards.

All Media Is Local: The shift towards media localization continues. "Faced with declining advertising revenues and competition from the Web, midsize, regional dailies across the country have been retrenching in recent years to focus on local news. That has scaled back their Washington coverage, and their national ambitions," notes the New York Times. Related, from last week: "I think intensely local, professionally gathered news is due for a comeback. It's the one thing you can't get anywhere else."

Anchorbot: The Wall Street Journal reports on "News At Seven," which "uses an automated computer program to comb online news outlets for major stories of the day and to pair them with video and still photos culled from sites like Google Images and YouTube." Even the anchor is generated by a computer. For more, check out our post on this very same topic from three months ago.

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What if you held a military coup and nobody cared enough to cover it? Call in the citizen journalists, of course. While the story received less play at some media outlets than others on Tuesday and Wednesday, by this morning, the military takeover of the government in Thailand has pretty much faded from the pages. As our friends over at Lost Remote are quick to point out though, there’s plenty of coverage for those looking for it.

LR’s Steve Safran reminds us that Global Voices is a great place to visit to read what bloggers in on the scene are saying. One surprise -- bloodless coups in Thailand aren’t too scary, according to one blogger:

Well… today.. scary day? No.. its more like a holiday. After the TV declared a holiday, I slept till 3pm… It’s not scary like how military coups are like else where. It’s a happy mode. No one blowing each other brains out. And if only everyday Bangkok could be naturally this less congested. On the streets, civilians are enjoying the holiday. Bringing food and water to the soldiers, photo taking session, flowers presented to soldiers.”

Safran has also been keeping tabs on the citizen-journo video action over at YouTube. Safran’s take:

I enjoy the non-narrated slice of life stuff most. You can tell from this simple street scene that a peaceful coup has taken place. Forget distilled reports - when you see tanks riding peacefully down the street with passenger cars, that tells you plenty.

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It looks like The Anchoress wasn’t the only advocate of citizen journalism who found last week’s “Outside Voices” commentary by Samuel Freedman worthy of a response. Dan Gillmor, editor of the citizen journalism blog, Bayosphere, takes issue with many of Freedman’s points in this post:

I’m a fairly prominent proponent of citizen journalism, and I do agree it’s part of a wider democratization. But far from seeing it as a “shattering of the power of the unelected elite” and a total circumvention of the professionals, I’ve repeatedly said this is about expanding the number of voices. I wouldn’t mind shattering the arrogance that Freedman’s essay exemplifies, but one of my goals is to spread and share the power for everyone’s benefit.

Terry Heaton lodged similar complaints at his blog...

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"Citizen Journalism" is one of those phrases that sounds pretty straightforward, but when you get right down to it, most people aren't entirely sure exactly what it means. Basically, a citizen journalist is someone from outside the news business who engages in the kind of journalism that is traditionally the purview of the professionals.



A citizen journalist might send pictures of a significant event into a news outlet. They might share stories about newsworthy experiences they've had. Or they might analyze, report and even disseminate the news themselves. Both MSNBC and CNN have been tapping citizen journalists to augment their coverage – they've used their websites to solicit and post photos from private homes in New Orleans, audio and videos of how people are responding to Katrina, and stories about how high gas prices are affecting peoples' lives, for example.



Are bloggers citizen journalists? Well, yes – and no. Those of us at Public Eye, for example, most certainly are not – after all, we're paid employees of CBS, and that puts us in a different position than someone who starts a blog on their own. But many independent bloggers can certainly be considered citizen journalists: They report from war zones, do the kind of analysis one might find on opinion pages, and post photos of news events on their sites, despite the fact that they're not affiliated with news organizations.



There are, however, reasons for news organizations to be skittish about relying on citizen journalism. The benefits are clear: There are immeasurable positives in having someone who happens to be on the scene of a developing story take pictures or call in a report. But there is also a chance that those reports won't be reliable. (There's that chance with the professionals, of course, as well – Jayson Blair being the most obvious example – but at least, with professional journalists, their jobs depend on their truthfulness.) As David Carr wrote Monday in the New York Times, "I was at the World Trade Center towers site the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. People had seen unimaginable things, but a small percentage, many still covered in ash, told me tales that were worse than what actually happened."

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