open Democracy News Analysis - Citizen war-journo? A Caucasus test , Evgeny Morozov - Comments

brianct on "Citizen war-reporter? The Caucasus test "

brianct — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:55:00 +0000

[... editor deletion ...]

1. 'To watch Russian leaders and media make the public case for war with Georgia when the conflict was still in its infancy was also to wonder why at that point there was still so little factual evidence '
'The Kremlin's spokespersons wanted the world to believe that the city had just suffered a Stalingrad-like devastation - though there was as yet no visible proof of the thousands of victims claimed. '
There were thousands of South Ossetians fleeing INTO russia. And the initial claims came from the South Ossetian govt.
2. 'Some Russian reporters present in the war-zone also turned to writing blogs, to overcome the self-censorship of their editors and newspapers, and to share the real story of Tskhnivali and elsewhere with their readers '
This comment applies to the western esp american reporters:
'While CNN basically used an 24/7 'open mike' policy towards Saakashvili, the rest of the US and European media uniformly bought into the US propaganda on the causes and effects of this conflict'
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2008/08/real-meaning-of-south-ossetian-war.html
3. The western media and Opendemocracy are ignoring the despotic reality of Georgia's Saakashvili:
'One of the constant themes in the US government and media presentation of the conflict in the Caucasus is the depiction of Georgia as a bastion of democracy. The Bush administration has increasingly invoked the terminology of the Cold War by referring to “democratic Georgia” as a symbol of the “free world” and its struggle against authoritarian Russia.
The reality of political life in Georgia is far different than the media image.
Only last November, in the midst of mounting protests against his regime, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili employed dictatorial methods against his opponents. On November 2, opposition demonstrations began in Tbilisi, demanding democratic reforms and the ouster of Saakashvili. These protests, while organized by billionaire media tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili, gave vent to grievances against government repression and the desperate living conditions of the population. They attracted tens of thousands to the streets of Georgia’s capital city.
The demonstrations continued until November 7, when the state police, acting on orders from Saakashvili, used tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons and truncheons to disperse the protesters. More than 600 required medical attention after the crackdown. On the same day, Special Forces raided Patarkatsishvili’s broadcasting corporation Imeldi, beating journalists and disabling equipment.
Saakashvili declared a state of emergency, suspending democratic rights such as freedom of expression and assembly. Independent broadcasting was halted even before the state of emergency was declared, and only the state-controlled television station was allowed to broadcast for a period of fifteen days. Imeldi was taken off the air indefinitely.
During the crackdown, Saakashivli called for snap elections to be held less than two months later, on January 5. The elections, held under conditions of political intimidation and repression, placed the opposition at an enormous disadvantage.
All media were under the de facto control of Saakashivli. In addition, two opposition leaders, Konstantin Gamsakhurdia and Shalva Natelashvili, were declared “wanted for treason.” The government accused them of conspiring with Russia to overthrow the government.
Patarkatsishvili, who likewise faced a government investigation for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government, began his campaign from Israel. He withdrew from the elections after the government released a recording of him attempting to bribe a police officer.'
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/aug2008/saak-a18.shtml

evgeny.morozov on "Citizen war-reporter? The Caucasus test "

evgeny.morozov — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:56:44 +0000

Cathy, thanks for your comments. I've watched the FoxNews/YouTube debacle quite closely and have written a piece about it -- not sure if it will got out though; it's actually closer to a million views now and it did produce a lot of hysteria -- including deputy chief of the presidential administration calling Fox News's behavior "the pinnacle of shamelessness"...

I do agree with you that citizen journalism is a concept that is far too broad to be dismissed outright; what often passes as "citizen journalism", for example, is good old activism using the same digital tools that citizen journalists use -- YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, etc. It would be hard to deny that such campaigns have tremendous value -- but they are not journalism, strictly speaking...

I also wonder to what extent success of citizen journalism depends on the availability of Internet infrastructure -- if the cybewars escalated and Georgians or Ossetians had no access to the Internet at all, it's not at all clear how they would be doing their reporting. I know the famous case of Burma and satellite phones -- but anyone to use a satellite phone in that region to transmit photos would be automatically labeled a spy....

But thanks for the great comments -- I found them very interesting.

Evgeny

Cathy Fitzpatrick on "Citizen war-reporter? The Caucasus test "

Cathy Fitzpatrick — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:37:51 +0000

I'm so glad you've taken this on, Evgeny.

There are a lot of reasons why citizen journalism is limited, and can't work everywhere, and shouldn't work everywhere; this has to be about complementarity between user-generated media and professional commercial media or public media.

Reporting is hard and dangerous work in a conflict zone; it should be compensated properly, and the person in this situation needs an editor and needs extensive knowledge.

Citizens in a situation that reaches the point of war tend to already be mobilized in one direction or another by state propaganda; war is usually the continuation of television by other means, as Lawrence Weschler once famously said about the Balkan wars. People in this part of the world are reliant on state-controlled Russian broadcasting and state-controlled Georgian broadcasting that got a lot less independent in the last year or so.

People whose perceptions are already pre-aligned from their media setting aren't suddenly going to spring free of that setting and start asking hard questions, especially of themselves or their neighbours dodging bullets. "Citizen journalism" isn't a narrative to save a community, and enable people to survive; nationalist fables are.

The perfect result of this we saw on Fox TV, which interviewed a 12-year-old Ossetian girl who had fled the region, after living in her uncle's basement during the bombing, along with her aunt. They reported faithfully that Russia was their saviours. When questioned about bombing, the girl faltered for a moment, and couldn't quite report any eyewitness of bombing, but she believed it to be the case. Both were absolutely sure that the figure of 2,000 civilians killed was correct, even though they had no eye-witness report to back it up themselves -- they had fled. And that's how it works. You cannot pull "citizen journalism" that would be questioning the official state version, out of this sort of situation.

The Fox news clip, interrupted several times with commercials and some probing questions from the anchor, drew more than 350,000 views on YouTube, and numerous, aggressive replies from Russians in particular saying "See? It's all the Georgians fault" and "see? Fox News is censoring the truth and silencing these women because of evil Bush and the neocons". That *is* your citizens' journalism. That *is* the result -- a YouTube hysteria.

On the other hand, more than 17,000 people joined a Facebook group called STOP the aggression in Georgia, and it was the Twitters and the blogs that turned up the first (and so far best) war photojournalism. So the story is mixed, and it's not over.

Citizen journalism is a concept a lot like democracy itself -- it depends on what kind of demos you have to start out with to see the outcome.

Cathy Fitzpatrick

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/un_tethered

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/ngo_accountability

Citizen war-journo? A Caucasus test , Evgeny Morozov

Evgeny Morozov — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:49:51 +0000

To watch Russian leaders and media make the public case for war with Georgia when the conflict was still in its infancy was also to wonder why at that point there was still so little factual evidence - particularly photos and videos - from observers on the ground in South Ossetia's capital, Tshkinvali. The Kremlin's spokespersons wanted the world to believe that the city had just suffered a Stalingrad-like devastation - though there was as yet no visible proof of the thousands of victims claimed.

It seemed a golden opportunity. After all, Time magazine had famously proclaimed "you" - that is, all of us - its "person of the year" in 2006. Surely news of the award, and the technology to act on it, had reached South Ossetia - so that at least one person would produce a conclusive account of how much damage had been inflicted on the city and its inhabitants. Where, in short, were the citizen journalists?

The screen of war

As the Caucasus war unfolded, those traditional media organisations that still had bureaus anywhere near that exotic part of the world struggled to fly in professional reporters. The Kremlin already had a head-start in winning its domestic public-relations battle: in the absence of much evidence to the contrary, its claims of more than 1,500 victims of "Georgian aggression" found a ready, and outraged, audience. Only later did humanitarian organisations such as Human Rights Watch release reports suggesting that the true number of casualties was much lower and that level of destruction had been greatly overstated; few in Russia seemed to be paying attention by that point.

openDemocracy's ran a MacArthur seminar on Credibility in the New News in February 2008

The same pattern was repeated a few days later in relation to the small Georgian town of Gori, this time with the Russians (who had attacked it) playing the opposite tune. They responded to broadcasters' reports indicating that Georgian civilians had been killed by denying they had inflicted such damage, and dismissing the old-media images as "staged". It was a perfect opportunity for citizen reporters to fill in the gaps? The fact that they didn't in the first days of this quick war may reveal that - in war reporting at least - the great promise of citizen journalism is often an empty one.

True, it would be a great injustice to say that Russian and Georgian bloggers ignored the war: the sheer number of posts they wrote on the subject would overwhelm even the most voracious readers. The spectrum of views was wide - support and denunciation of both sides, predictions of an imminent third world war, claims that Russia was regaining its position on the world stage. But amid the outpour of online punditry, hard and facts-only reporting from Tshkinvali or Gori was missing.

There are good reasons, some of them very basic. A simple truth about modern conflicts is that they tend to occur in places without universal access to internet broadband and the low ratios of iPhones per capita. It would be sublimely naive - and condescending - to expect South Ossetians or Georgians to respond to intense shellfire by taking a crash-course in podcasting, even if they did have electricity and and an internet connection. Tskhinvali and Gori were never going to be hubs of user-generated content from a war-zone.

And yet..some "citizen reports" from Tskhinvali and Gori have emerged despite the technological challenge. This is impressive and welcome, but it comes with a further problem: trust. Most were of poor quality, and many appeared on blogs with no reputation, no previous blogging history (some had been registered only a few days before the war), and carried no identification of a real person with a real name who could claim responsibility for or ownership of them.

Beyond the technological and trust limitations, there is a visual one. To report war seriously and well is a subtle and complex task, requiring especial care where visuals are concerned. A house that looks devastated by shellfire may be one of the many such buildings in the neighbourhood, or it may be the only one; if the latter, it may have been damaged in an earlier conflict. The choice of what to show and the interpretation of what is shown can shape the public's attitude toward the war and its perpetrators. The public entrusts reporters to approach these issues fairly; and communicate their findings honestly, comprehensively and ethically. It is usually the venerable names and institutions that are the main repository of this trust, as is evidenced in the way that that even small-scale manipulation by individual reporters (the "smoke in Beirut" image / Andnan Haji case of 2006) tend to backfire on the institution itself.

In this context, the citizen reports from Gori and Tskhinvali that I had seen triggered more questions than answers. How do I know that the many amateur photos circulating in the blogosphere had not been doctored or staged; and whose reputation would a revelation to this effect hurt? In the context of a full-blown information war (and PR war) being waged by both sides in domestic and international media, it is only to be expected that spin-doctors would try to use the blogosphere to spread misinformation.

The blogging balance

The few blogging accounts I did find enlightening were almost exclusively those written by people I had met on earlier trips to Georgia - and whom I trusted. It's probably true that - even if the narratives themselves were identical - I would be predisposed to trust accounts written by such people and not those from a group of anonymous bloggers. Even here, though, my friends' blogs helped me understand the horrors of this war from the (mostly Tbilisi) perspective of civilians caught up in it, and didn't offer details of what was happening around Gori.

Some Russian reporters present in the war-zone also turned to writing blogs, to overcome the self-censorship of their editors and newspapers, and to share the real story of Tskhnivali and elsewhere with their readers - not that of the Kremlin's spin-doctors. But these are still professional reporters representing the traditional media, paid to travel to the war-zone, who embraced blogging out of concern for their reputation and ethics - not themselves citizen journalists.

Thus, it had become clear a few days into the conflict that citizen journalists had in general failed to adequately cover its early and most crucial stages. The many traditional news organisations that had eagerly embraced user-generated content and made it part of their reporting strategy discovered this in a painful way - as (for example) CNN's iReport became a battleground in the propaganda wars between Russia and the west; most online commentators merely uploaded videos (usually recordings of their own pontification in front of a webcam) - with little factual reporting. Moreover, even if they did upload something that resembled even basic reporting, how would I know I could trust them? It's not enough that iReport belongs to CNN; after all, does CNN vet these videos as closely as those that were submitted by their in-house reporters, and if not, is this what can be expected of the " most trusted name in news"?

The democratic faultline

The crisis of citizen journalism revealed by the CNN experience also highlights a crucial but false assumption that such media companies have made: that everyday citizens would take the great risks associated with war reporting for the far-from-obvious benefits of being featured on a site like iReport. In addition, these organisations seem to have believed that the people who watched such reports would trust them as much as (say) Christiane Amanpour's. The satire of the iReport in The Daily Show's Jon Stewart in the United States still packs a punch:

"Yes, CNN wants you to spare them what is currently the most arduous part of what they do - reporting! And not just anywhere - apparently they want you to get as close as possible to an exploding building during a hurricane. 'Gee, this assignment looks dangerous. You know who'd be good for that story? John Q Schmuck'" .

This is not to deny the great value of citizen journalism in other circumstances - some even having to do with wars. For example, Iraqi bloggers' performed an invaluable function in reporting Iraq after the United States-led invasion of 2003, the Iraqi insurgency that followed, and daily life outside the Baghdad "green zone". At the same time, these two conflicts are very different. The war in Iraq had been intensively prepared and discussed in the media for months; news organisations' choice to have a reporter in or near Baghdad or not by the time the invasion occurred was not related to any expectation that others would do an equally good job with their cellphones.

South Ossetia, by contrast, did not even exist on the radar of many media companies before the conflict of August 2008 (though openDemocracy at least had and has published extensive analysis of the area and of wider conflicts in the Caucasus). The inattention is widely shared - after all, how many people knew about Srebrenica, Mogadishu, or Grozny before these places became known for great tragedy? But it is also damaging - for the world is bound to experience more Tskhinvalis and Goris.

The implication is serious for the future of democracy as well as for the future of media. The more citizen journalists are expected to fill the enormous gaps left by the establishment media as the latter struggle to redefine their business models (part of which means closing their foreign bureaus), the more the media play into the hands of leaders like Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev. They and those like them will always - as in South Ossetia - take advantage of media blackouts to create narratives favourable to their own political strategies. Citizen journalists are hardly appropriate sparring-partners for the Kremlin couple. But CNN and the BBC still are.

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