Bearing Witness 2.0: You Can't Spin 10,000 Tweets and Camera Phone Uploads
China just delivered a stunning, real-world demonstration of the changes rocking -- and transforming -- modern journalism.
When deadly riots broke out in the western province of Xinjiang last week, the Chinese government sprang into message control mode. It choked off the Internet and mobile phone service, blocked Twitter and Fanfou (its Chinese equivalent), deleted updates and videos from social networking sites, and scrubbed search engines of links to coverage of the unrest. At the same time, it invited foreign journalists to take a tour of the area.
That's right, it slammed the door in the face of new media -- and offered traditional reporters a front row seat.
China's leaders realized that it's one thing to try to spin the on-the-ground views of bused-in reporters ("To help foreign media to do more objective, fair and friendly reports," in the words of the government's PR agency), but quite another to try to spin the accounts and uploaded images of tens of thousands of Twittering and cell-phone camera-wielding citizens.
The Chinese have clearly learned the lessons of Iran.
The same can't be said about New York Times columnist Roger Cohen who, writing about covering the Iran uprising, recently claimed:
To bear witness means being there -- and that's not free. No search engine gives you the smell of a crime, the tremor in the air, the eyes that smolder, or the cadence of a scream.No news aggregator tells of the ravaged city exhaling in the dusk, nor summons the defiant cries that rise into the night. No miracle of technology renders the lip-drying taste of fear. No algorithm captures the hush of dignity, nor evokes the adrenalin rush of courage coalescing, nor traces the fresh raw line of a welt.
How bizarre is it that Cohen chooses to attack the tools of new-media-fueled reporting by citing the very event that highlights the power of those tools -- and the weakness of his argument?
Indeed, search engines, news aggregation, live-blogging, and "miracles of technology" such as Twitter, Facebook, and real-time video delivered via camera phones, played an indispensable part in allowing millions of people around the world to "bear witness" to what was happening in Iran.
The truth is, you don't have to "be there" to bear witness. And you can be there and fail to bear witness.
Obviously, there is tremendous value in being an eyewitness. But we have to always keep in mind that the conclusions drawn by eyewitnesses are greatly influenced by the eyes doing the witnessing.
Malcolm Muggeridge famously called this "the eyewitness fallacy" -- the tendency of people to see, in eyewitness accounts, what they want to see.
As a longtime writer and editor for the New York Times, Cohen should be particularly aware of the limitations of eyewitness accounts.
"Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, [a scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade] pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried. This reporter also accompanied MET Alpha on the search for him and was permitted to examine a letter written in Arabic that he slipped to American soldiers offering them information about the program and seeking their protection." So wrote an embedded Judith Miller, "bearing witness" to the "silver bullet" proof of Iraqi WMD in the Times in April of 2003.
Miller was certainly there to vividly describe "the tremor in the air, the eyes that smolder." And her account feels so real. But it was oh so wrong.
Miller was hardly alone in seeing what she wanted to see when it came to Iraq. On-site reporting, as Cohen notes is not free, but, too often, neither is access. Bob Woodward wrote two books, Bush at War and Plan of Attack, that, in retrospect, glaringly demonstrate the sometimes-high cost of access. Woodward got his eyewitness scoops; the White House got a portrayal of Bush as a scrupulous, honest, highly moral leader. It wasn't accurate, but it sure was a pretty exclusive eyewitness account. It wasn't until a third book, ironically with much less eyewitness accounting, that Woodward belatedly began getting the Bush presidency right.
Another example of the limitations of Cohen's credo that "to bear witness means being there" comes courtesy of his fellow Timesman, executive editor Bill Keller. Three days after the fraudulent Iranian election, and well after the street protests had been revved up and hundreds of videos had been uploaded and thousands of tweets had been posted, Keller -- in Iran to "bear witness" -- reported:
"With this election, Mr. Khamenei and [Mr. Ahmadinejad] appear to have neutralized for now the reform forces that they saw as a threat to their power, political analysts said."
Not exactly a miracle of eyewitness reporting.
In his column on Iran, Cohen writes movingly about being torn when he was forced to leave: "We journalists are supposed to move on. Most of the time, like insatiable voyeurs, we do. But once a decade or so, we get undone, as if in love, and our subject has its revenge, turning the tables and refusing to let us be."
I share his love for impassioned journalism, the kind that earned Upton Sinclair, I.F. Stone, and George Orwell their well-deserved place in history. But this is precisely the kind of journalism that is so often derided and dismissed by those who think the function of journalism is simply to offer up both sides of a story or an issue and then get out of the way.
Cohen says he has left a "chunk" of himself back in Tehran. We should all be leaving chunks of ourselves behind when we encounter not just people demanding their freedom abroad, but those here at home who are losing their jobs, who can't get health insurance, and whose houses are being foreclosed. And we should leave a chunk of ourselves with them not just once every ten years, but every day.
New media is not replacing the need to "bear witness," it is spreading it beyond the elite few, and therefore making it harder for those elite few to get it as wrong as they've gotten it again and again -- from Stalin's Russia to Bush's Iraq.
Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff
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I think you have misunderstood Roger Cohen's argument. I wish there were more true journalists like him around.
I am no technie, but it seems that the companies who provide internet service to China should all agree to withdraw their services to countries which cut off their services to cover for their crimes, as we have seen of late in Iran and China.
China, particularly, would be severely injured if they were to block services out of China or into China for even a month, so for once, they should have some decency and do that.
Very, very, *very* well-put, Ms. Huffington. Cheers.
Speaking of spreading the word, Arianna you have to get this young lady on Huffington Post. This is a story that has to be told. I am not the writer but surely you can get to her through them. Everyone has to see this. It is proof of David Gregory begging Mark Sanford to come on his show and promising to "treat him right". i'm too old to tweet or text and all that but if you can you should see this. This program was once "legendary" but has turned into a horrific republican joke.
http://www
In a civil riot the first priority is to restore calm and order never mind who is at fault. That involves clamping down on rumor mongering. The new electronic media- internet, emails, twitter and what else have you - gives very quick and graphic information from a very limited perspective. The greatest danger of this kind of information is to cause panic and encourage mob revenge. The Xinjiang handling of the riots is an exercise in effectiveness. Cut off the means of spreading rumors. The need for information must nonetheless be met to prevent alarmist speculations. Therefore clear and prompt government media reports were forthcoming and these reports were rarely contradicted by external (western) media reports. Once calm is restored the veracity of the information can be checked. There is so far no evidence that the authorities over reacted, were unfair or that this is a pro independence riot or for religious freedom. Those US sponsored exile Uighur groups in the west have been castrated. The next time round won't be a next time round for the Chinese authorities will have learned very valuable lessons too on how to anticipate and prevent another riot. A very fundamental fact is no matter what the provocation China is in no danger of having her internal security threatened by any ethnic minority or external provocateur (the US.) There is no dissension on this score among the 1.3 billion Han who make up China.
Arianna, you must read this!
http://tpm
again, ariana, dig a little deeper.
replacing one or two faces with another prettier face or two is NOT gonna change anything.
if we're gonna have a socialized medicine, or a single payer system,
which is the only humane way to go by the way
without profit motive in health care,
we will have to SOCIALIZE more than just the health care system.
WHO IS AFRAID OF SOCIALISM?
that's the question.
WHO IS AFRAID OF SOCIALISM?
People who have a sense of achievement, people who want to get ahead in life, small business owners, successful people, people who don't want government to run their life.
When are we going to have government run the auto insurance industry, and homeowners insurance?
Respectfully, i think you are wrong Mrs Huffington. Roger Cohen was only writing about the unique perspective of reporting from the scene. He was not downplaying in any way "Twitter, Facebook, and real-time video delivered via camera phones..." Moreover, the important news we are getting from all these sources are coming from the people who are "bearing witness". In fact, almost all the news that i and others i know find worth reading about Iran is from Roger Cohen and the ordinary people who are bearing witness to the events. Thanks to Nico and others who are posting them.
Agreed.
Bearing [one-sided] Witness 2.0: You Can't Spin 10,000 Tweets and Camera Phone Uploads?
Actually the beauty of it is that you don't need to spin. You see, you just have to be selective with the source. Let me illuminate with some examples:
If you interview every heart patient in the most expensive hi-tech clinic, would you not come away thinking our healthcare system, far from broken, should be emulated?
I you interviewed owners of 80+ foot yachts would you have to spin/editorialize any overtly pro-business material you wanted to publish anyway.
And, if you wanted to show the Iranian government in the most negative light possible, guess what? Just publish stuff coming out of English-speaking Twitter-ac
Time for an alternative to alternative-media.
http://www
Excellent point and well made. And IMHO it points to an unmet need for more technology at lower or no cost that can be put in the hands of the other 98% of the Iranian population (I have no idea if your percentages are correct) and let them all (and others around the world) bear witness. And the increase in the coverage, the data, would be especially useful and important, since as Arianna puts it, "The truth is, you don't have to "be there" to bear witness. And you can be there and fail to bear witness."
Another example: One casual on-the-ground witness sees a young prostitute on Craig's List, or a van-full of Asian nail-salon workers being dropped off in a Westchester, NY village, or a Florida citrus grove full of South American workers; and another witness, armed with a little knowledge and a few one-on-one interviews, sees human trafficking (modern slavery) alive and well in the USA.
Amazing. I had always wondered about those nail-salons. There can't be enough business to support the rent in a fancy mall and have that number of employees. Same goes for Reflexology salons.
"Just publish stuff coming out of English-speaking Twitter-ac
Wait a second. Isn't the upper middle class of a society generally among the most complacent groups? These are the people who are protesting, getting arrested, and occasionally killed. Even if these people comprise a minority of Iranian society, I would say their willingness to take risks with their more privileged lives is definitely news.
Hmm, those who "can't get health insurance" .. so what? As long as people can get health care, and everyone in this country can, I think the only people who care that someone "can't get health insurance" are the people who are trying to sell it. That is why the insurance industry is behind the current effort to make health insurance 'mandatory'. Before the empowerment of insurance companies beginning the late 1960's, health insurance was not even needed. All doctors and hospitals were expected to treat those who could not afford it without charge. It was not a law, it was a cultural expectation. Health insurance destroyed parent/doctor relationship and now the current administration wants to reward it further .. the so-called "public option" is worst of all as that will likely lead to super-insurance company which will magnify the problems even more.
"As long as people can get health care, and everyone in this country can,"
I think you are terribly mis-informed about the availability of quality health care in the United States of America. I am unemployed and have no ability to pay. If I am diagnosed with a disease that is treatable only by enxpensive treatments, say some form of chemo or radiation therapy. Do you really believe it is available to me? No sir! The best I can hope for is to be kept out of pain while I die. That is not health care. The irony is that euthenasia (assisted suicide) isn't even available to me in most states. We treat animals better.
Twitter is an emerging technology that will one day revolutionize news reporting. Or lead to some other piece of software that does.
It is important that Huffpo take note of it, and be an early adopter. It was invaluable in getting news from Iran out.
On the other hand, this is a Tweet I just copied off the Huffpo story about NASA releasing new footage.
>raynecleoud: Ha ha! RT @philjeffs: Using my x100000000 multiplier, my crotch flavoured peanut >company is worth as much as the moon. #dragonsden. 1 minute ago from TwitterFon
Personally i would like the ability to turn off the Twitter posts so that the Huffpo stories and comments load that much faster.
Until some form of editing is devised to get rid of the 99% of tweets that are utterly ....valuel
New technologies like TWITTER shouldn't be rammed down HP users' throats. It should be a pull, not a push. IMHO.
The despots and dictators will never learn the very thing we acknowledge here each and every day. That the longer and harder the tyrants squeeze, hoping against hope to choke information and the truth that comes with it, the more history and truth escape their grasp. There are some things that ought not be "spun." The sacrifice of ordinary extraordinary people anywhere and everywhere who crave freedom and the rights of Man is one such "spin proof" story. Perhaps, with the distance and sociable comfort of the computer network, we have grown to complacent, to comfortable, to remind ourselves that the world is still both darkened by unimaginable tyranny, and brightened by billions of souls of hope, in whom basic freedoms become more precious than life, or treasure, or blood. All of us, everywhere, have a vital stake in these struggles. That which effects the freedoms of one, impacts the freedoms of all. It is high time that Americans and people everywhere make themselves once again part of the struggle and the light which will free people from a cloying darkness of tyranny that casts a shadow over all it touches.
I read Roger Cohen's column and came away with a different impression. I believe he was writing about the importance of a journalist being on the scene. In fact, he WAS on the scene during the turbulent times in Iran and I believe was somewhat tormented that, for whatever reason, he was no longer there.
Of course, the new media outlets gave us vital information, provided by very courageous Iranian citizens. Cohen provided first-hand documentation, with the added benefit of an outstanding journalist's writing skills.
Thank you, Arianna, for once again put it so wonderfully in the Huffington Post.
Yes, as the Persian Javidan Kherad said: "Truth is of two kinds--one manifest and self-evident; the other demanding incessantly new demonstrations and proofs."
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