By Hajrah Mumtaz

Dawn, Nov 8, 2010

WHAT is ‘true journalism’? The gathering of newsworthy material by a chosen few who then disseminate it to a large consumer group or newsworthy material that anyone makes available to the public?

With the rise of the Internet media, this question has increasingly begun to agitate media theorists and practitioners. Loyalists to the former point of view argue that every man’s potential to become a journalist risks creating a barrage of information that is not subject to any filters of quality or veracity, with the significant being drowned in the pedestrian.

This bloc maintains that there is no way of independently verifying the ‘news’ you can find on the Internet, and that it is this very function of lending credibility that marks professional journalists who have the required set of skills and understanding of journalistic integrity.

Opponents of this viewpoint argue that this is precisely what makes the so-called citizen journalism so interesting and important. This form of news reporting is achieved by people who were at the scene of a newsworthy event, who saw things as they happened. Their views are of interest because they are part of and representative of the end-users of journalism.

According to this point of view, professional journalism has become leg-shackled to constraints such as the need to generate revenue and capture a greater corner of the market. The result, they say, is the sacrifice of journalistic integrity at the altar of market forces and concerns.

Moreover, this line of thinking goes, formal journalism involves a process of filtration that is part of any news organization of decent size, but which also implies that news is treated as a commodity. Therefore, the accounts of ordinary people are more likely to be unbiased because they need to sell no spin.

This debate is in large part academic because the reality is that whether we agree with it or not, citizen journalism is here to stay. Certain points put forth by both sides have merit and display logic. But there is little to be gained from either endorsing or rejecting citizen journalism, since people will continue to put up their views and others will continue to choose to access them or not. It cannot be seen in terms of good or bad — it just is.

What cannot be denied is that in recent years a number of stories of pivotal newsworthiness have emerged through non-formal journalistic means. (This is not, of course, to deny that the formal news media also broke their share of scoops.) The most recent was WikiLeaks’ disclosures of US tactics in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have raised questions about America’s role of omission or commission in war crimes and rights abuses.

Here in Pakistan, there was the Swat ‘flogging’ video that paved the way for the army operation in the north-western parts of the country. Newspapers from those weeks show that until that point, public debate revolved around the lines of whether or not the form of ‘Sharia’ proposed by the Taliban was valid.

That video, though, uploaded on to You Tube by an anonymous source and of indeterminate veracity (indeed, its authenticity came under discussion, to no real conclusion, early last year too) raised a storm of condemnation that we can now see cemented the citizenry’s determination that the brutality of the Taliban had to be opposed. This allowed the Pakistan Army to wage war against elements of whom some, at the very least, are bound to be dissident Pakistani citizens.

Then there was a video that appeared to show Pakistan Army soldiers beating men who appeared to be in the process of being interrogated. This footage, again unverifiable and uploaded anonymously, brought into focus the concerns human rights groups had been raising about the military resorting to extra-judicial means in areas where anti-militant operations are under way.

A few weeks ago a new video surfaced that appears to show Pakistani soldiers carrying out summary executions. This time the army was forced to take notice and set up an inquiry commission, not least because US legislation such as the Leahy Law prevents the US from offering military aid to foreign military units that are involved in human rights violations.

Theoretically, it can be argued that any news footage of the nature cited above could easily have been faked. While such a process is highly unlikely in the context of the above-cited videos, it serves to bolster the purposes of a theoretical argument against citizen journalism: the footage was uploaded anonymously and there was no indication of the time or place where the incidents took place, or the identity of the people involved.

To put it differently, there is no possibility of assigning responsibility, neither of the events depicted nor of the fact that they entered the news stream.

This underscores the manner in which citizen journalism can be misleading. The same footage could have been sent — anonymously, even — to a television channel or a newspaper.

While the professional reporter may have decided to protect his source, he would nevertheless have had some idea about the veracity of the incidents — or at the very least investigated the reliability of the footage since it would be disseminated under his name and responsibility. The scoop would have been published or broadcast under the name of that particular journalist and under the aegis of his organization.

Citizen journalism has no room for this sort of assigning of responsibility. It has many merits, amongst which the most important is as an alerting mechanism for breaking news. But it lacks the process of distillation and multi-tier verification that characterises formal journalism.

To be a journalist, as New York Times columnist Roger Cohen put it, is to bear witness. To that I would add, to be a journalist is to be responsible for your output. Citizen journalism is too nebulous to be wholly reliable.

By contrast, precisely because professional journalists are paid to do what they do, and because their reputations depend upon it, they usually leave no stone unturned to do it to the best of their ability.