Amateur journalism or amateur jokes? Distinguishing the two is the issue that emerged from the recent tsunami picture hoaxes. It’s going to recur exponentially. But there’s help at hand for editorial decision-makers.
It’s a big thing for a paper to publish a front-page apology. But that is what Martin Williams, acting editor of the Citizen, had to do this time last week. It fell to him to acknowledge that his paper had joined the ranks of several others in publishing fake photos of the recent tsunami.
Those taken in by the fraud include, reportedly, the Times of India, the Calgary Herald and Sky News. Even in little Grahamstown, from where I write, the Grocott’s Mail fell for it.
The story about the Citizen‘s woes was broken on the Mail & Guardian Online last week, and it quoted me as saying the paper should have been more alert.
Perhaps that sounded too glib, because the potential to make such blapse is high and will increase rapidly. Amateur news is on the agenda today thanks to the escalating ubiquity of communication devices in the hands of the general populace. So the key question then is not finger-pointing, but developing an advance methodology to assess how amateur content should be treated.
This is going to be an enduring challenge. It used to be said that freedom of the press was mainly meaningful to those who actually owned a press.
Nowadays, all that is needed is a cellphone and/or digital camera — among the first tsunami reports being mass distributed were ”txt msgs” peer-circulated, postings on blogs, and e-mails sent to friends and networks. If you were a tourist clutching a digital video camera when the tsunami struck, you were immediately in business
Apart from publishing technology, amateur reporting today is also being boosted by the ease and speed of sending digital content around the world. This facility condenses globalisation in a very direct and immediate way, and it contrasts with the parochial character of much mainstream media content.
When 3G cellphone networks become widespread, there will be a metaphorical tsunami of content from anyone and everyone: ”Coming to you live from Aceh, this is Joe Soap telling you what’s happening.”
With an eye to this future, populist media analysts such as Dan Gilmor and Steve Outing celebrate the new empowerment of non-professionals to produce media. They have endowed these grassroots producers with the high-sounding title of ”citizen journalists”.
Conferring such glamorous status on this constituency may be understandable inasmuch as the real ”professionals” have lost their glory — due to poor ethics, incompetence and/or neglect of grassroots voices. Yet as romantic as the ”citizen journalist” rhetoric may be, the positive political significance can also serve to mask some of the journalistic strengths and weaknesses.
It is the case that local-level observers can out-compete the mainstream media in the spread of eyewitness coverage. And, as time passes, the mainstream will not only fall behind in on-the-spot reports: it could even be dwarfed in terms of audience scale and reach.
Already, for news about the tsunami, massive numbers of people in the United States turned not to the mainstream, but to the ”people’s media”. Nielsen/Netratings is reported to have found that tsunami news and video increased traffic to Blogger.com by 73%.
Some among the mainstream have seen the potential and co-opted what is coming from outside the institution. During the tsunami, the BBC and MSNBC were leading examples, carrying content directly (and explicitly) contributed by non-professionals. Establishment television networks such as APTN distributed amateur video.
In this light, the Citizen was simply following a general fashion when it decided to use amateur tsunami pictures. The mistake was in selecting falsified content.
The deeper problem is evident in the unintended irony present in the words of one media website that marvelled: ”There’s a seemingly endless amount of amazing home videos and photos of the deadly tsunami and aftermath.”
The Citizen‘s photos were indeed amazing — they were of a high-tide wave in a Chinese river, but touted (depending on who was sending it around the internet) as the December tsunami hitting, variously, Thailand or Sri Lanka.
In accompanying text, the images were purported to be photos sourced from a ”friend and former business associate … fortunately she made a quick exit”. Sure sounds like a Nigerian 419 scam letter, and yet it still failed to trigger sufficient suspicions in many quarters.
This was not the only visual untruth detected in the amateur outpourings. A check on Snopes.com and Truthorfiction.com shows the following tsunami-related images as also fraudulent:
- A photo of a tsunami creating havoc on a beach is actually from a Nordic fjord, taken some years ago.
- An image of a wave approaching Phuket, according to the caption, was allegedly snapped by ”an employee of Kellogg”. Wow. And if such credentials were not enough, the viewer is expressly reassured that ”this picture is not a fake”. The photo is a doctored image of a Chilean coastal city.
- Pictures of strange sea creatures said to have been thrust to the surface by the tsunami are actually images from 2003 captured by scientists on an expedition.
The answer is not necessarily to avoid all the burgeoning amateur editorial. Rather, it is for the mainstream media to do a better journalistic job on their own — and to differentiate themselves from the rest by doing wholly trustworthy news and analysis, depth, perspective and the likes.
However, amateur content also challenges the mainstream not just to do different coverage, but also to maintain quality standards when drawing from amateurs.
It is time to return, then, to the methodology of how to distinguish the amateur journalism from the amateur (bad) jokes. There is no magic formula, but a process I developed (drawing on ideas from the Poynter Institute) might be of ”HELP” to the pressured folk in the newsroom. According to this mnemonic, when facing questionable content, follow the steps below:
H: Hear what your heart tells you is the right thing to do. This is an emotional story, but is it overwhelming professional scepticism and responsibility to audiences? Listen for a faint pulse asking why you are the lucky example to have had these pictures come to you. In short, take stock of your enthusiasm and your doubts.
E: Externalise. Consider the wider issues. Locate the problem in the context of similar challenges elsewhere. For instance, there’s relevance in the case last year where the United Kingdom’s Daily Mirror published digitally manipulated photos making British soldiers appear to be torturing Iraqis. The consequences were dire. New technology can too easily manufacture a sense of trust, so is the amateur content at hand possibly in this category?
L: Look again — in more detail — at the task. Suppose your heart says, yes, publish, but your externalising says no. You now have to weigh the two up. Scrutinise give-away language and telltale signs. And ask what it would take to verify in terms of your available resources and broadcast/publication pace? Can, for such content, deadlines be forfeited in the interests of truth?
P: Possibilities should be evaluated. What are the alternatives to ignoring the content completely? What could yet give you a scoop and still stop your cred from crashing? For example, could the Citizen pictures have been published with a caveat that ”these amateur images claim to be …”? Ought one to go even further and explicitly point out that amateur content can be true or untrue? Should readers be alerted that there might turn out to be a story behind the apparent story, and that in the meantime its publication should be taken as provisional?
Working through the stages of ”HELP” won’t necessarily produce the perfect decision. But it should still the stampede to publish. And, who knows, it might even reinvigorate a simple principle of professional journalism: ”When in doubt, leave out.”