I have an op-ed in Newsday today on the implications of the Saddam execution video and news served raw (permanent link here).
We are in the age of news served raw. And it doesn’t get much rawer than the cell-phone video of Saddam Hussein’s execution that made its way to the Internet only hours after the deed was done. Even as news organizations deliberated about whether and what to show of the execution, the entire event appeared on YouTube, available for anyone who cared or dared to watch.Get ready for more of the same. Witnesses to any event can now capture and share what they see not just with acquaintances but with the world, and without the filter and delay of news media. And that doesn’t mean just cell-phone snapshots of bombings or surreptitious footage of closed events. We also have access to the guts of news – original documents, full transcripts, unedited video. So anything anyone sees can be recorded and disseminated. Life is on the record.
Journalists, especially editors, may lament this latest loss of control. But again and again I have seen the public gravitate toward raw news. When I started newspaper Web sites, one of the most popular features was a complete, unedited feed of The Associated Press wire, riddled with “writethrus,” advisories and other wire-service arcana. It beat by miles the traffic to a packaged version of the same news. My students at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism tell me how they prefer TV news that is less heavily produced, closer to the source. And those Hussein videos have been viewed a few million times. Not everyone wants to watch every grisly detail or dig into every dull document. But we do want to know we can.
Is this bad for journalism? I say no. How can we object to having more information available to more people?
Does the journalist still have a job? I say yes. The journalist has more of a role than ever – but no longer as the gatekeeper. The information is out there for anyone to find. The journalist can help uncover it, verify or debunk it, and can add perspective and context. Journalists still need to do what they have always done: Find the facts and the people who know what they are talking about – witnesses and experts. Now, thanks to the technology of the Internet, there are new ways to gather and find this information and to collect the wisdom of the experts. Journalism changes but, I argue, grows.
One possible new role for journalists is to educate the public about what reporters learn early – that sometimes, the “facts” outpace the truth. We witness this on cable news, when we see news unfolding before it can be confirmed. Remember the West Virginia mining disaster, when the pealing of the church bells and the happy people rushing by cable’s cameras, together with mistaken reports and rumors, told us that most of the victims had survived when, in truth, most had died. Similar confusion came often in battlefield reports from Iraq. The fog of war becomes the fog of news. So we in the public must continue to exercise the skepticism and discrimination of the journalist in judging the news. Journalists cannot continue to believe that they can deliver the truth for us in neatly packaged stories once a day. No, journalists need to arm us with the means to judge the truth ourselves. Actually, that has always been the job of the journalist, only now it is more apparent.
So journalists are no longer here to sanitize the news for our protection. Those of us who want to watch the Hussein execution know where to find it. I see a benefit even in this. For in their efforts to package and polish the news, editors sometimes make the world look neater than it truly is. We can recognize this in the battlefield videos on YouTube, showing us a harsher view from the front. And there can be no clearer demonstration of this than the Hussein execution. Killing someone is never as antiseptic and cold as it appears in the stories about lethal injections in America or in the first reports of Hussein’s death. Our newfound ability to watch the complete event takes away the pretense of civility some tried to place around the act. So now we can judge it in the light of day. This is the truth, as raw as it gets.
: MORE: Tim Luckhurst in The Independent:
But, for new-media enthusiasts, the fact that amateur film from a mobile telephone set the global news agenda shows citizen journalism has come of age.From the moment the explicit footage appeared on Anwarweb.net, traditional editorial processes were redundant. No editor decided who could witness this tawdry spectacle. . . .
With the Saddam images, new-wave unmediated journalism proved that freelance citizen images can dictate, not merely influence, the news agenda.
But Adrian Monck counters:
The arrest of the individual who shot the video will undoubtedly deter anyone tempted to video other executions. The genie of information freedom pops out, but the stopper quickly goes back on the bottle.
Yes, there are still points of control. But fewer and fewer of them. Adrian says we didn’t see other executions. Yes, but we did see the pictures from Abu Ghraib.
Peter Preston in the Observer wonders what influence this new competition had on mainstream outlets:
Could you see Saddam swing on the internet? Almost instantly. What’s the point of denying your readers something that competitors hand them automatically? Does your audience need shielding from a grisly old world and buy you to comfort it at breakfast time? That seemed to be what a suddenly squeamish Simon Jenkins argued in the Guardian on Friday.
Says the squeamish Mr. Jenkins:
Conventional wisdom holds that this edifice of rule-bound censorship is collapsing. The editor has been demystified and disempowered. All the world can peddle its wares on the internet without let or hindrance. Each is his own artist, novelist, reporter, diarist, columnist and, above all, editor. The carefully written and processed article enjoys no higher status than the blog responses that cling to its feet. Why listen to steam radio when you can wander the backstreets of YouTube and MySpace and watch real people do real things. Alexander Pope was right: such random chance is “direction which thou canst not see,/ All discord, harmony not understood”. Or as Donald Rumsfeld put it, stuff happens.To say that the internet is giving formal journalism a nervous breakdown is an understatement. If palm-sized mobiles can intrude on every privacy and hackers break into every computer, who are newspapers to remain as haughty intermediaries? If I do not want Saddam Hussein’s head lolling across the corn flakes, I need not log on to it (pending the advent of 1984). Every two-bit terrorist or overnight exhibitionist has the freedom of the web, and I can always press “close” and “delete”. . . .
There is no substitute for a disciplined, rule-bound, edited news-gatherer any more than there is for a formal theatre, movie-maker or publisher. Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” will not find its apotheosis in the internet. The message transcends the medium and always will. The fact that a reader’s taste can sometimes be shocked shows the power of the trust on which it is normally based.
And as we get prissy about the PC execution, let’s remember Mussolini’s as he was hung upside-down on a meat hook in the public square. There’s nothing humane about an execution.
I am a loss to figure out how someone who claims such grand (grandiose?) experience in MSM can write such a piece and not once mention the P (propaganda) word?
I wonder how many of the folks traveling with the White House honestly think of themselves as real journalists? Likely every last one of ‘em, but the image, burned into my small mind at least, of President Bush speaking to the nation in front of New Orleans’ Jackson Square just after Katrina, all lit up like he was at freakin’ Disney World, makes me think of a White House press corps made up not of journalists, but of lighting grips and propagandizers. And we haven’t even touched on the entire Mission Accomplished “set piece.”
“So journalists are no longer here to sanitize the news for our protection.” Sure, and I’m Emma Goldman.
[...] Van een orde is the long tail van het exibitionisme. Niets zo onterend, niets zo perfide, niets zo pervers of er is ergens op de wereld wel iemand die het laat zien. Dankzij voortreffelijke zoekmachines is alles te vinden, hoe nauw de niche ook is. We leven in tijden van rauw nieuws, zegt commentator Jeff Jarvis. Het is wat nieuwe consumenten willen: het echte leven, authentieke beelden. [...]
[...] Van een orde is the long tail van het exibitionisme. Niets zo onterend, niets zo perfide, niets zo pervers of er is ergens op de wereld wel iemand die het laat zien. Dankzij voortreffelijke zoekmachines is alles te vinden, hoe nauw de niche ook is. We leven in tijden van rauw nieuws, zegt commentator Jeff Jarvis. Het is wat nieuwe consumenten willen: het echte leven, authentieke beelden. [...]
The new rule is obvious: Fewer filters equal more news. This turns the news economy on its head. It used to be the opposite. The greater the number of filters — foreign correspondents, clackety-clack telex machines or inky-fingered copy editors — put on a story the better. It ADDED value. No more. The humble cel phone equipped with a lens changed all that, and Saddam’s execution is only one example of the new definition of “news.”
All this journalistic self-congratulation over how wonderful we are will last another year or two at the most. Mr. Jenkin’s “disciplined, rule-bound, edited news gatherer” is dead. He was a cog in an old production process. Like air tubes and linotype machines, objectivity, the two sources rule and allied reporting styles were employed because they were a good way of doing business. They made newsrooms more efficient. That is no longer true.
The “raw news” is often like an optical illusion – now a young woman, now an old woman – depending on its context. Even sources such as the Saddam video come with framing and perspective. One traditional role of journalism is to decide whether the picture contains the young or old woman, for those of us who are inexpert in doing so.
It is good for journalism as a whole to have the raw news available to the public. It makes the profession more rigorous and competitive. Raw news is a fact and it’s not going away, but we are still going to need dedicated experts to explain and contextualise the news. Simple specialization of labour, that’s all.
[...] BuzzMachine [...]
[...] And of course, the big irony was that the last 40 minutes of the 20/20 episode was pre-empted by the news of the execution, the video of which has been watch over 1.3 million times on YouTube to date. I debated whether to watch it, but in the end chose to do so if for no other reason but to simply contextualize the discussion about it. I wonder if it’s horror is lost on some of our kids, however, who are so used to seeing public deaths played out over and over. And I wonder what all of this means in terms of the implications for teaching them how to navigate what Jeff calls on his blog, “the age of news served raw.” It goes back to every one of our students need to be editors first. The complex thinking needed to understand and really “edit” that video is not something you can find in a textbook. It involves understanding not just how it was produced and how it was distributed, but the political realities surrounding it, the motives of those who captured it, the different cultural responses to it, and, in the end, the ability to respond accordingly. [...]
Will there be no discussion at all of prurient interests here? Does anyone truly believe that any of the millions that viewed the Youtube version of the Sadaam hanging did so for any reason other than the vicarious thrill of witnessing a person being killed, live on camera? No one really thinks this was viewed as a learning experience, do you? If this is your version of “news served raw”, I want no part of it, thanks. Do you really believe a supporter of the war will experience a revelation once he/she sees a video of an American soldier with his head blown off? And since parents can’t even be bothered to learn how to work their TV V-chips, how vigilent do you think they will be (or are) on the web in this context, relative to the availability of ugly graphic videos you consider “news”?
Your definition also opens up a huge Pandora’s Box, since by your own admission, any ugly, vile or disgusting act captured on video, audio or text can be considered “news served raw”. Kiddie porn is certainly a newsworthy topic in 2007 America, given its widespread availability on the net. Would graphic video depictions of kiddie porn on a free website fit your definition of “news served raw”?
As a weak but not irrelevant analogy (”in the small,” as they say) re “is there still a place for professional journalists,” a friend of ours is a professional photographer. When high-quality digital cameras fell to the price range that allowed a lot of the general public to buy them, there was a short time during which many photographers worried that with good lighting and Photoshop software and the ability to shoot thousands of shot to get just the right one, a lot of companies would start using “locals” (employees already on the payroll who were not as expensive as professionals) to shoot their catalog pictures or the company paper photos or the annual report photography; likewise, weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, christenings, etc.
According to my friend, what has happened differs from the prediction of wide-spread “citizen photo-journalism.” It (citizen photography) is certainly wide-spread, but its effects were less dramatic: it drove poorer-quality professionals from the business because the general public not only had more options but were better educated from having tried to use the fancier equipment; it upped the “bar” for professionals because they didn’t get work just because they had expensive equipment irrespective of their talent or work ethic or pricing; it adjusted pricing a bit since there were a new group of competitors (”my brother has a great camera and takes a lot of pictures”).
But, according to my friend, there was another effect that has really helped his business grow, and that is the fact that a significant portion of the market has tried the new equipment, tried using the “locals” already on payroll and these people have discoved that equipment is not the difference — great professionals have a skill that is not widely available in the general public. As a result, this portion of the general market place has a great appreciation for his ability, values more highly the fact that it isn’t just a matter of getting fancy equipment, and they are more willing to pay for this quality than before. His business has actually increased, partly due to lower-quality (lower-priced) photographers being eliminated from the market and partly due to the fact that he is more than just the owner of great equipment.
Similarly, low-quality journalism that existed (for pay) in the past simply because they had the equipment, will continue to be eliminated from the market-place and high-quality journalists will be appreciated more as it becomes clearer that even though I have the option to read from 1000 times more writers on the web, it has made me realize what a truly gimlet eye is possessed by some journalists — the availability of raw news and many commentators has increased my appreciation for the skills of the truly gifted.
Thanks for your continuing commentary on these areas.
[...] We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming on the mind-boggling media transformations to bring you NBB Basketball Highlights. With networked journalism, you’re in the game. [...]