True Citizen Journalism: A New Paradigm in News Coverage

It has been called, “The Day Television Grew Up”. It was November 22, 1963 and midday soap operas were interrupted with terrible news: President Kennedy had been assassinated. For the next four days, we gathered around our television sets as the networks ran non-stop coverage of the assassination. Before that weekend, Americans watched a few hours of TV a night. After the assassination, the TV set became a permanent part of the family.

I couldn’t help but think about this past weekend as I watched the video coming in from the protests in Iran. What has so many upset is that there appear to be voting irregularities calling the results of the election into question. But telling the story hasn’t been the work of professional journalists. The Iranian Regime took steps weeks ago to cut the flow if pictures and information to the outside world. What they have accomplished in reality is the eye-opening truth that cell phones, PDAs, and laptops have turned private citizens into the eyes and ears of the world.

It only makes sense. The news business has always been about informing people. Technology has taken it now to a whole, new level. From the streets of Iran, we are seeing images of the battle for democracy – not shot by some professional cameraman, but by individual citizens using a cell phone.

If tyrants -- and really, governments everywhere -- learn nothing else from this, let them understand this: It’s all about “truth” and “transparency”. Clamping the power of censorship on the media no longer guarantees the story won’t be told. I keep wondering when the government of Iran will cut access to the internet, but in reality they can’t. There are too many businesses that need it to survive. Think about it: thousands of ordinary citizens, armed with cell phones and video cameras, telling the story.

You know, we should never forget that the most dramatic images of the Kennedy assassination were not shot by a professional journalist, but an ordinary citizen named Abraham Zerpruder, carrying an 8mm home movie camera. Perhaps not too surprizingly, the most dramatic images from Iran, have been captured for history by the 21st Century equivilent of that camera.

In the Los Angeles Times, Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, is quoted as saying: "What the Iranian leadership didn't seem to understand, as they went through the traditional methods of censorship, is that everybody is now a reporter." Make no mistake, those sending the pictures do have an agenda, just as the government that is trying to stop them does. Even the news media airing the pictures argueably have an agenda. But the important thing to remember here is that the information itself can't be stopped.

The whole world really is watching.

Downing Bolls