Citizen journalism and the crisis in Iran
This is not the first time that restrictions on the media have become news themselves; media restrictions have been discussed in relation to Gaza, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan in recent months. What sets the situation in Iran apart has been the near total reliance on ‘citizen journalism’ for information, footage and images of the unfolding crisis. Mobile phone videos and social media networking in particular have dominated online, print and broadcast news coverage of the events. This raises important questions for those concerned with journalistic standards in this unusual media landscape.
The restrictions on journalists
Since 13 June, thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets to protest against an election perceived to be fraudulent. The resulting restrictions on foreign journalists are intended to prevent the protesters from disseminating information inside Iran that will reach global audiences. While there have be no attempts to censor the words of reporters, they have been banned from attending the ‘unofficial’ demonstrations.
These limitations have been felt in several ways. Channel 4’s Lindsey Hilsum reported as early as 13 June for Channel 4’s ‘Snowmail’ blog, that journalists were being prevented from leaving their hotels. The BBC’s John Simpson was briefly arrested, Tim Marshall reporting for Sky News had his Press Card revoked, and the BBC’S John Leyne was ordered to leave the country.
Another form of blocking the international media soon emerged, as the flow of information became obstructed in both directions. Peter Horrocks, Director of BBC’s World Service explained the disruption experienced by BBC viewers as being caused by “heavy electronic jamming of one of the satellites the BBC uses in the Middle East to broadcast the BBC Persian TV signal to Iran. Satellite technicians have traced that interference and it is coming from Iran”. It is clear that the Iranian government was doing all it could to prevent foreign journalists from covering the election protests for the outside world.
The result of these limitations has been that the information being presented to audiences in the UK has come largely from Iranian citizens themselves, who have been documenting events as they happen with the technology available to them. This reliance on ‘citizen journalism’ has implications for the way news is read and viewed by UK audiences.
The challenges citizen journalism presents
Citizen journalism is the process whereby members of the public, as opposed to professional journalists, record, analyse and disseminate information. The reports coming out of Iran from ordinary Iranians raise traditional questions about how journalistic standards are to be maintained, but in an unfamiliar media climate.
The issue is the loss of control over the content of the news ‘packages’ that news teams put together for their viewers. These segmented reports traditionally arrange perspectives and images from various angles within the story for the viewer. However, given the restrictions in Iran, news teams have instead been airing grainy mobile phone footage sent by protesters and witnesses, and printing short eye-witness statements that are difficult to corroborate.
Considering the appetite for 24/7 news and the importance of the events, it is clear that that the amateur footage of the protests must be shown. But viewers as well as journalists may be far less clear about the nature of the events unfolding, and journalists must wrestle with the temptation to report as authoritatively as they would were more reliable information available.
A further distortion is that the amateur reports and footage were largely sourced from young and technologically-savvy Iranians, whose profile is considered to fit supporters of the opposition presidential candidate, Mir-Hossein Moussavi. With this in-built slant in the sources available, British journalists may have overstated the level of opposition in Iran, without giving explicit recognition to this inherent imbalance in the limited information available to them.
This challenge was most acute over journalists’ use of Twitter, the social networking site. At the the start of the crisis, Twitter was used by Moussavi supporters to communicate both with each other and the outside world. Western newscasters embraced it as a medium that enabled them to get up-to-the-minute grassroots information that circumvented the Iranian regime, with journalists (such as Sky’s newly-appointed ‘Twitter correspondent’, Ruth Barnett) cross-referencing ‘tweets’ in order to tell stories.
But the information coming out of Twitter was not just published as it was; it was refined into a narrative. One of the best examples of this was Andrew Sullivan’s blog for The Atlantic, which interspersed fresh material from social networking sites with a running commentary.
Twitter’s role has been widely commented on. John Gapper stressed its centrality in the Financial Times, calling Twitter ‘the tinderbox that fanned the spark of revolt’. Timothy Garton Ash, writing for The Guardian, characterised the crisis as ‘Digital David fights theocratic Goliath’ – an allusion to the overlapping cultural and political divisions brought into focus by the crisis
The limitations of citizen journalism became clearer as the crisis unfolded. Almost a week into the protests, The Economist noted that ‘Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness’, as it became flooded with foreign messages of support for the protestors, and disinformation from the Iranian government.
Twitter became such a prevalent source for journalists because of the absence of the usual avenues of gathering information. Many journalists demonstrated great resourcefulness in telling the story of the crisis. But there is a need in these circumstances for journalists to present the information available in a way that makes the deficiencies of the news reports clear to news audiences.
A new chapter in news?
Citizen journalism will not replace traditional reporting, but enhance it. It is doubtful that amateur mobile phone footage would have had such prevalence under more controllable circumstances. But any tool that helps journalists to gain insight into important developments in hostile conditions should be welcomed. The proviso is that journalists are candid about those tools’ deficiencies.
The use of Twitter by journalists was hardly new in this context; it had been prominent in the Mumbai attacks in November 2008, and the US Airways crash-landing in the Hudson river in January 2009. Mobile phone footage has been used by news teams for longer still. However, the novelty of Twitter as an instrument for news in this story has been its use by British journalists – with plenty of editing and analysis – to extrapolate information with which to identify and verify breaking stories.
Journalists are best able to operate without any such impediments. When media access is restricted, the only option may be to report the words and images of the people at the heart of events, whatever form the information takes. Citizen journalism holds the potential to be a powerful addition to the traditional armoury of journalists everywhere. Yet it is vital that in these situations journalists do all they can to address the limitations of their reports, and give audiences enough information so that they can assess the value of the reports themselves.