Bias in the Media: What You Can Do

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My grandfather just reminded me of a great addition to my post on citizen journalism. As I was watching the TV news on Wednesday, the talking head was interviewing Hossam Hamdan and an ACLU lawyer (the preceding link is the transcript, search it for for “Hamdan”).

The issue was that Naji Hamdan, an American citizen from the UAE, had been imprisoned by proxy in the UAE for the U.S.A., and has not been charged with a crime by the United States. Complicating the issue is how the UAE has a record for torture, a record in clear conflict with U.S. policy.

I took issue with how the interviewer, Tony Harris, worked to shape the interview. He did a lot of presuming (Harris’s own word) and continually cut off Hossam Hamdan and the lawyer. He created his own story in the course of the interview instead of focusing on the who, what, when, where, why, and how that could be provided by the interviewees. Harris worked to promote a specific connection and push his own very specific conclusions and agenda, that of Hamdan to terrorist organizations, at the expense of neutrality.

Here’s a quote that churns my stomach whenever I read it:

[Harris speaking] …But Sam, one more question quickly for you. Your brother, it is my understanding, runs an auto parts store >where he is shipping containers all over the world. He is a devout Muslim who travels overseas a lot. Now I am not drawing >any conclusions from that but I am wondering if in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks do you understand why the federal >government would be interested in learning everything it can about your brother’s trips and business dealings?…

Citizen journalism combats this by promoting diversity in the news, long a goal of American media regulation. This is just one more reason citizen journalism rocks.

Citizen Journalism

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I’ve been following the recent attacks in Mumbai. I first heard the news on CNN, but the best way to keep up has been online. What always amazes me is the dedicated cadre of Wikipedians who constantly update Wikipedia with the latest news (aside from Wikinews’s excellent coverage). Fifty minutes after the attacks started Wikipedia had a page on the attacks up and four hours after a page on the previously unknown Deccan Mujahideen.

As well, CNN throughout the day has shown MMS videos, witnesses via Skype videochat, and discussion of the Mumbai bloggers keeping connected during the Mumbai curfew over the net and via services such as Twitter.

I like this trend. I love our continually-developing participatory culture. I think that ultimately it is for better, as consumers’ competition with traditional content producers can only result in increased product quality. The MSM (mainstream media) is beginning to embrace citizen journalism. For example, readers on CNN.com can now submit stories through iReport (with a disclaimer about the news being unvetted).

Any discussion of citizen journalism requires a discusion of its legal implications. In the United States, journalists are protected from disclosing their sources in thirty states. There is no legal precedent yet for whether bloggers, who increasingly break major news before the MSM, can be classified is journalists and thus be under those same protections. Only time will tell, but I am hopeful.

EDIT: Additional info from CNN on the ongoing Twitter use during the Mumbai crisis. I agree with CNN’s assessment that the wisdom-of-the-crowds nature Twitter is both its greatest asset and handicap. From the article:

As blogger Tim Mallon put it, “I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.

“During the hour or so I followed on Twitter there were wildly differing estimates of the numbers killed and injured – ranging up to 1,000.”

What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted.

A quick trawl through the enormous numbers of tweets showed that most were sourced from mainstream media.

Someone tweets a news headline, their friends see it and retweet, prompting an endless circle of recycled information.

Can I Get a Fact-checker Please?

As we have discussed in class and on this blog, one of the critiques most often leveled at citizen journalists, particularly in the semi-anonymous blogosphere, is their lack of credibility and accountability. A common rebuttal to this critique is that citizen journalists occupy a different niche than the credentialed press corps. Their role, advocates argue, is simply to report honest, unedited, personal stories, “from the ground,” and it’s the job of the card-carrying journalists to do the fact-checking, worry about pesky professional ethics, attempt to maintain some level of integrity, objectivity, etc.

Where do you draw the line, though, between “real” journalism and anything-goes rogue journalism? Is it acceptable for news outlets that enjoy a perceived credibility, riding the increasingly blurry line between the professional and unprofessional, to pick up a blog story (i.e., a rumor) and report on it, provided they qualify it with the adjective “unconfirmed”?

Critics of citizen journalism scored a point this week when a false report that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a major heart attack led to a very sudden, 10% dip in Apple’s stock trading value. CNet’s Greg Sandoval reported on how the rumor originated, spread, created a panic, and then died, all in a matter of minutes. Apparently, the rumor began on iReport.com a CNN-sponsored community blog, which promises: “Unedited. Unfiltered. News.” The identity of the user who submitted the report is being investigated by the SEC.

At issue for many media traditionalists, is that the “story” was picked up by a well-regarded digital business blog, Silicon Alley Insider, which reported on it without first hearing from Apple or Jobs’s representatives, simply noting that the report was “unconfirmed.”

Amidst much controversy, Silicon Alley Insider defended their decision, arguing that: a. the story had gained traction when the report was spread, and thus somehow substantiated, via posts to Twitter and Digg; b. in occupying the unique niche of “online journalists,” they do not view their roles as serving as media “gatekeepers;” and c. as such, they should not be held to the same standards of accuracy as mainstream outlets like The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. They conclude that their primary responsibility is to privilege immediacy of information over accuracy.

Hm. Really?