Citizen Witnessing

Revisioning Journalism in Times of Crisis

Stuart Allan

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745651965, 9780745651958
• eBook ISBN: 9780745664439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

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 med...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halt Title
• Other Books
• Title Page
• Copyright
• 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