Blood marriage
The Web and mainstream media strike an uneasy alliance in covering the crisis in Iran
By Kevin Uhrich , Sher Porter 06/25/2009
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the awesome power of the emerging news technologies of our times — Facebook, YouTube, blogs and, mightiest of all, Twitter — than the shocking images arising from the brutal police crackdowns in Iran over the hotly disputed election between cleric-backed hardline incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and reform-minded ex-Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi.
CNN relentlessly stayed with the crisis last weekend, devoting 24-hour coverage — much more than all other mainstream outlets — and its Web site offering access to it all, also round-the-clock. But the fact is, the Atlanta-based news network — along with every other mainstream newspaper and TV outlet — had few choices other than to pull most of its sometimes raw, unchecked and unchallenged content directly from the Web: Since the uprising following the June 12 elections, writes Human Rights Watch, the government banned most foreign press, heavily censored domestic media, arrested reporters and photographers, intimidated bloggers and has tried to block or censor Web sites.
With most major newspapers in the United States cutting their staffs, particularly foreign bureaus, America and much of the world learned of the situation through the Internet practically as it happened, with graphic videos of people dying — tagged with warnings against potentially disturbing violence.
“I think that [citizen journalism] is obviously very important in places without a free press,” said Elizabeth Zwerling, associate professor of journalism and adviser to the student newspaper at the University of La Verne and an occasional contributor to the Pasadena Weekly. “Some of this information would not be accessible to everyone if it were not for the availability of these [social] networks. It is harder for the Iranian government to censor Twitter and YouTube.”
Under this hybrid marriage of necessity, the mainstream media is still important, but mainly to amplify news that’s being broken to a larger audience with these new technologies — creating a relationship requiring great trust, yet one fraught with uncertainty and many possible dangers. One reason for this uneasiness may be that now, instead of checking and double-checking facts, sources and other information, “it’s literally hundreds of thousands of people posting their raw data,” said Warren Swil, a Pasadena City College journalism instructor and adviser to PCC’s student newspaper, The Courier.
Forms of journalism are evolving and changing, Swil said. Citizens today, thanks to technological convenience, are becoming more involved with recording and sometimes posting what they see. And now they have camera phones to capture images or shoot videos of whatever they see — in the case of Iran, the possible overthrow of a government, a revolution in the streets.
It’s not known exactly how many people actually saw the video of Neda Agha-Soltan’s heart-wrenching murder through the numerous social networking sites. But we do know that the death of Neda, which fittingly means “call” or “voice” in Farsi, generated millions of Twitter “tweets” on the global text-messaging phenomenon when a video of her being fatally shot in the chest by a government militiaman appeared on the Internet soon after it happened Saturday evening.
The big issue with using these networks as viable sources of news remains the fact that they may not always be accurate. In the case of the 26-year-old Neda, for instance, there was initially some dispute over who the dead woman was, and whether the incident was, in fact, real. It became apparent soon enough that it was horribly real and Neda was who people said she was. But other information being sent out on the Web may be rumor, hearsay, propaganda or just plain wrong. There are no filters; no one checking names, dates and other facts. Still, “I think there’s some good to the evolution of people out there posting what they see,” Zwerling said.
“What is really hard to figure out is what is the valid material and what is the noise,” Swil said, adding that CNN aired disclaimers on some stories about the Iranian protests to let viewers know that the information being broadcast may not all be accurate.
It seems that much like making political changes — those happening in Iran, for example — the revolution occurring today in the world of journalism is sure to be a messy one.
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