Citizen journalism? Despite 7 billion smartphones, most stories remain hidden
There are more than seven billion smartphones on the planet, all built to instantly transmit video and photos online, and yet many of the world’s biggest stories remain largely hidden from us.
From the war in Ukraine to the crisis in the Middle East, all the way to the health of the Princess of Wales, the global audience is being presented with a foggy image that it struggles to make out. At a time in the evolution of communications technology when we might have expected news media to be all-seeing, its shortcomings are being exposed.
This is not the future we imagined in the Noughties, when the rise of citizen journalism promised more insight and the new abundance of camera phones had international news agencies purring over the potential impact of user-generated content for the instant recording of news events wherever in the world they happened.
Two decades later the deluge of visual imagery is with us but much of it simply cannot be trusted. At the same time, the old foe of censorship is growing, and the restrictions on professional journalists covering the world’s hotspots have led to a paucity of independent verifiable information among a sea of rumour, propaganda and hate.
Israel’s media blockade of Gaza has provoked an open letter signed by 30 leaders of international news organisations and 55 foreign correspondents, including Alex Crawford of Sky News and the BBC’s Fergal Keane. It demands “free and unfettered access to Gaza for all foreign media”.
Two years in, the Ukraine war feels increasingly remote and under-reported, despite the efforts of stalwarts such as the BBC’s Kyiv-based James Waterhouse.
The meltdown over the manipulation of Kate Middleton’s Mother’s Day Instagram post was a world away from the front-lines, but it was another reminder of how little we get to see and how little we can trust the visual imagery before us.
The decision by international news agencies to take the rare step of applying a “kill notice” to the doctored image was a royal first. Rather than quashing the social media speculation over Kate’s condition, it intensified it.
Media coverage of the Princess’s recovery from “planned abdominal surgery” has revolved around two photos. A grainy paparazzi shot showing Kate and her mother Carole in a car was published this month by the American entertainment site TMZ but shunned by UK media, which deemed it an intrusion of privacy.
Historically the UK press has adopted a sense of ownership of the royals that has led to toxic treatment of individuals, most obviously Diana, Princess of Wales (right).
But the current “royal rota” of correspondents is not the cluster of reptiles that some imagine, and is showing greater caution.
For American outlets who see the royals as an object of fun, the new responsibility of the British press is suspicious.
Jezebel website wondered why the “notoriously voyeuristic and nasty UK tabloid machine hasn’t really batted an eye over Middleton’s disappearance”, while “there are large swathes of the internet that believe Middleton’s disappearance from the public means she’s incapacitated, even dead”. Setting aside the conspiracy theories, what I find compelling is that the royal rota seems to have no more knowledge of the reality of Kate’s situation than the rest of us.
This leaves an information vacuum that is being filled with wild speculation, including that of press colleagues.
Ruby Naldrett, senior social media editor at the Daily Mirror and Daily Star, posited her “analysis” of the Photoshopped image, making an outrageous claim that a Vogue cover shot of Kate, taken in 2016, had been “edited” into the Mother’s Day family portrait. Her post went viral, attracting 49 million views.
The theory was debunked as “absurd” by Eliot Higgins, an expert in detecting manipulated imagery, who pointed to numerous differences in the pictures.
I hope this social media hit is not celebrated as good practice by Naldrett’s employer, Reach, a publisher which seems fixated on traffic at all costs.
As the development of AI threatens a great flood of false imagery, all journalists must be mindful of their responsibilities. The Kate photo saga should help convince education authorities of the importance of teaching media literacy in schools.
Meanwhile, we need better information from the world’s war zones. In Ukraine, as in Gaza, reporting is severely limited. The Russian lines are almost invisible to Western journalists.
So I am looking forward to a new BBC project, Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods, which is based on immersive footage filmed by frontline Ukrainian troops. Directed by Jamie Roberts, it promises to show how modern camera technology can take us somewhere that was previously beyond reach.
But, as with all visual media today, we must view it carefully, knowing that even this groundbreaking imagery cannot give the full story.
The Kate photo furore was another reminder of how little we can trust the visual imagery before us