Charles on… anything that comes along

Robert Scoble ponders a little about John Naughton’s article in last Sunday’s Observer on “Why I have serious doubts about the ‘citizen reporters’”.

Naughton’s point, very encapsulated: why were people taking photos and videos of the horrific things that had happened to some of the victims of the London bombings of July 7th? To quote him, I find it astonishing - not to say macabre - that virtually the first thing a lay person would do after escaping injury in an explosion in which dozens of other human beings are killed or maimed is to film or photograph the scene and then relay it to a broadcasting organisation.

Scoble remarks that as a journalism student, he recalls meeting several professional journalists who brought their images that were never published. They had horrific images from war. From traffic accidents. From murder scenes. They shot the images because that was their job: to capture the scene and do reporting. They were never used because editors were sensitive to their readers and because they could find images that told the story without needing to rely on the blood and guts.

What’s changed? Well, the photographer can publish his/her images now without checking with an editor. Just go to Flickr and drag the images up. Interestingly enough, I didn’t see many of the horrific images get published. And, the ones I saw most bloggers link to were pretty benign images. But, of course, a headline of “citizen journalists were pretty responsible” isn’t nearly as interesting as the one John had on his story today.

Sorry, Robert, but you’re not close enough to the ground on this. Read up about the phenomenon of ‘happy slapping’ in the UK. Or how about the kids who go to some of the more vicious websites which have videos made by the insurgents in Iraq, showing beheadings - real beheadings of real, live hostages - which they download to their mobile phone and show to each other, or Bluetooth around? When I gave my talk to the NUJ about new technologies, one of the audience had been really disturbed by the group of Somali kids in his street who’d shown him one of those videos, and suggested it was the reason why there was a bunch of police surrounding a house down the street. (It wasn’t.) As for the images on Flickr (say) not being horrific, perhaps people complained about them? Some of the offensively-captioned ones I got on my Flickr feed disappeared quite fast. Just because you haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

There’s a really cruel, gore-wallowing streak in some people that technology and situation sometimes colludes to enable. It’s not journalism; it’s not bearing witness, except in the most anti-empathic way. That’s the contrast with, say, the journalism coming out of Niger, where millions face starvation. It’s not wallowing to report what’s happening there; the aim is to change it. That, perhaps, is what marks out “true” journalism from voyeurism and gossip. Though I’ll accept that a lot of what passes for journalism in whatever medium doesn’t rise much above the latter category.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Are journalists really a major source of 'stop energy' (as Rob Scoble seems to imply)? (26 October 2004; score: 68.78%)
• My Newsnight appearance - yeah, well, watch it now (4 February 2008; score: 63.87%)
• MPs baffled by new technology: "jamming will stop happy slapping". No it won't (26 June 2005; score: 58.84%)