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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 polity Copyright © Stuart Allan 2013 The right of Stuart Allan to be identifi ed 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 Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, 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-13: 978-0-7456-5195-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5196-5(pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Group Limited, Bodmin, Cornwall 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. For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com Contents Acknowledgements page vi 1 ‘Accidental Journalism’ 1 2 The Journalist as Professional Observer 26 3 Bearing Witness, Making News 56 4 Witnessing Crises in a Digital Era 92 5 News, Civic Protest and Social Networking 120 6 WikiLeaks: Citizen as Journalist, Journalist as Citizen 152 7 ‘The Global Village of Images’ 174 Notes 207 References 220 Index 246 v Acknowledgements With the benefi t of hindsight, I realise that my initial thoughts about citizen witnessing fi rst began to take shape when prepar- ing a chapter for an edited collection I was putting together with Barbie Zelizer at the time, Journalism After September 11. Our diffi culty in fi nding 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 chal- lenge 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 citi- zens. Variously described as ‘amateur newsies’, ‘instant reporters’ or ‘personal journalists’ and the like, their fi rst-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 transfi guring into journal- ism 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 redefi ned 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 vi Acknowledgements 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 universi- ties during this period, enabling me to try out new arguments and to benefi t 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 Griffi th 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 anony- mous reviewers of both the initial book proposal and the fi rst draft of the manuscript for their perceptive comments. Leigh Mueller’s copy-editing was exemplary. And, fi nally, last to be acknowledged, but fi rst in heartfelt appreciation, Cindy and Geoff. vii 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 indi- vidual, however, any sense of journalism is likely to be far from their mind, should they fi nd 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 spontane- ous, 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 discus- sion, and thereby highlight several themes to be explored, we fi rst 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-fl ying 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 1 Citizen Witnessing 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 some- thing nasty :-S’, he tweeted. Before he knew it, he began process- ing 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 helicop- ter 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 ‘gun- fi ght’ 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 fi rst-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 Qaddafi had been captured or killed. Offi cial con- fi rmation 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 intensifi ed even further before Keith 2 ‘Accidental Journalism’ 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 informa- tion, leading the ABC, CBS and NBC television networks to inter- rupt their programming with the news (Stelter, 2011).

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