Journalism and Eyewitness Images

Digital Media, Participation, and Conflict

Mette Mortensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134080502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte e politica

Building on the vast research conducted on war and media since the 1970s, scholars are now studying the digital transformation of the production of news. Little scholarly attention has been paid, however, to non-professional, eyewitness visuals, even though this genre holds a still greater bearing on the way conflicts are fought, communicated, and covered by the news media. This volume examines the power of new technologies for creating and disseminating images in relation to conflicts. Mortensen presents a theoretical framework and uses case studies to investigate the impact of non-professional images with regard to essential issues in today's media landscape: including new media technologies and democratic change, the political mobilization and censorship of images, the ethics of spectatorship, and the shifting role of the mainstream news media in the digital age.

1
The Eyewitness in the Media

‘Eyewitness’ is an inescapable keyword in the contemporary media landscape. Formats such as ‘Eyewitness News’, ‘Eyewitness reports’, ‘Eyewitness photography’, ‘Eyewitness accounts’, ‘Eyewitness sport’, ‘youwitnessnews’, and ‘Citizen eyewitness’ testify to the eager embrace of this concept, particularly in the realms of nonfiction genres such as news, documentary, report-age, and sports. Witnessing¹ may, following John Durham Peters’ seminal article ‘Witnessing’, stand for ‘all three points of a basic communication triangle’: message, sender, and recipient (2001, 709). Accordingly, it is ‘a strange but intelligible sentence to say: the witness (speech-act) of the witness (person) was witnessed (by an audience)’ (2001, 709); that is, first-hand eyewitnesses perform the act of witnessing specific events, and by so doing situate media audiences as second-hand witnesses. Media technology for storing evidence is also accorded the status of witness; for instance, the legal vocabulary refers to the ‘mechanical witness’ of a camera or tape recorder. In sum, the act of witnessing is performed ‘in, by and through the media’ (Frosh and Pinchevski 2009b, 1), and the notion of the ‘witness’ may refer to media content, sources of information, media technologies, media users, and media produsers (Bruns 2008).

The multiple meanings testify to how the concept of the eyewitness lies at the heart of today’s media experience and involves complex ideas of reality, communication, and technology. As a parallel to the role performed by the eyewitness in the court of law, a setting in which the ‘bond between speech and truth is strictly policed’ (Peters 2005, 250), negotiations of the truth in connection with media representations of events in the material world often evolve around the figure of the eyewitness and the text of the testimony. Theorizing the concept of the witness thus ‘cast[s] light on basic questions such as what it means to watch, to narrate or to be present at an event’ (Peters 2001, 709).

In 2001, Peters (722) argues that most eyewitnesses are not aware of their role as such until after the closing of an event, when they are called upon to account for their first-hand information, which is deemed valuable in establishing and reconstructing the factual sequence of events. This no longer holds true per se. With the proliferation of digital media, witnessing has become an individual choice, a recurring option, a mass phenomenon. Eyewitnesses do not just make appearances in the media as sources of information, but are capable of creating and distributing media content themselves. As a standardized and ritualized response to crisis and conflict, individuals on the spot film events as they unfold with mobile cameras or other digital recording devices. The videos and photographs are instantly distributable through a web of relations ranging from media platforms, organizations, institutions, and actors in the global, digital media landscape. In other words, eyewitnesses have become self-mediated by incorporating digital media technologies into their practice and adapting to the logics of the current media system.

Today’s citizen photographer is often regarded as a successor to the traditional figure of the eyewitness. In news and popular culture, phrases such as ‘eyewitness photography’ and ‘eyewitness accounts’ are applied to news images taken by amateurs. This coupling is explainable by how the current non-professional photographer shares the exclusive proximity to events, subjective viewpoint, and fragmented narrative with the classical eyewitness. Despite having received the notice of researchers, this inheritance has scarcely been theorized in a systematic fashion. Barbie Zelizer in her historical overview of the role performed by eyewitnesses within journalism sees the citizen journalist as the latest incarnation of this figure: ‘Eyewitnessing’s viability as a key word today rests on a curious combination of technology and nonconventional journalistic presence’ (2007, 421). Taking a broader approach, Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski include the media produser in the concept of media witnessing, which

casts the audience as the ultimate addressee and primary producer, making the collective both the subject and object of everyday witnessing, testifying to its own historical reality as it unfolds.

(Frosh and Pinchevski 2009b, 12)

Similarly, Anna Reading (2009) considers the citizen journalist in light of theories concerning the eyewitness in a case study of the mobility and fast dissemination of amateur images in connection with the news coverage of the 2005 terror attack in London. Notwithstanding their valuable insights into contemporary eyewitness images, none of the above contributions present a thorough theoretical framework for understanding contemporary non-professional picture production and distribution as a reconfiguration of witnessing. This is the task of the first two chapters of this book. Chapter 1 outlines a theoretical framework for eyewitnessing as a mediated form, which is further developed in the definition of contemporary eyewitness images in chapter 2.

Combining amateur news images with theories on the witness serves the double purpose of contextualizing today’s practices in a wider historical perspective of media, politics, and culture, while at the same time offering a vocabulary to define contemporary amateur pictures and their producers. To establish and delimit the research field, this chapter takes its point of departure in a critical assessment of the rich literature pertaining to the special position for experience and narration held by the witness, as well as this figure’s political, cultural, and moral significance. In the second section, the historical roots of witnessing in law, and, to a lesser extent, religion, are presented. This paves the way for arguing for the media as a separate realm of witnessing in the third section. The fourth section outlines three overarching tendencies in the contemporary media, to which eyewitnesses contribute by their transmission and forms of expression—namely, liveness, individualization, and produsage. Finally, the fifth section sketches some general functions and norms in relation to witnessing as a mediated form.

Theorizing Witnessing and Witnesses

Although a media history or cultural history of witnessing has yet to be written, the prominence of the eyewitness has not passed unnoticed in academia during the past decades. Judging from the literature in the field, however, the centrality of the eyewitness is not accompanied by a clear ‘consensus about what it means’ (Zelizer 2007, 408). This is partially a result of different fields such as comparative literature, psychoanalysis, trauma studies, cultural studies, theology, and media studies engaging theoretically with the witness. The concept also lacks precise definition within individual disciplines. Whether the term ‘witness’ should be reserved for first-hand eyewitnesses or extended to media audiences as second-hand witnesses is still being debated in media studies, for example.

In the 1990s, the witness became a topic for research, especially in literary, psychoanalytic, and philosophic thinking. Scholarly interest was primarily aimed at the genre of witness literature that was spawned during World War II by authors such as Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Victor Klemperer, and Imre Kertész. Literary theorist Shoshana Felman and psychoanalyst Dori Laub published their pioneering work Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History under the auspices of this school in 1992 (see also, e.g., Agamben 2000; Caruth 1995; Ekman and Tygstrup 2008). This book explores the way testimonies from Holocaust survivors continue to reverberate in politics, culture, and art despite—and, perhaps, also because of—the ‘crises of witnessing’ broached in the title’s reference to the perceived impossibility of bearing witness to traumatic events, which have left survivors speechless. Felman and Laub examine witnessing as a means of claiming responsibility not only for the individual’s own story, but also for the general writing of history, in the always-difficult transformation from personal testimony to collective memory. Alternating between a literary and a clinical perspective, the authors analyze the positions, obligations, and negotiations of witnesses in works such as Claude Lanzmann’s 9-hour documentary Shoah (1985) and Albert Camus’ novels The Plague (1947) and The Fall (1956).

Media scholars started taking an interest in the witness in the 2000s. Rather than seeing the Holocaust survivor as the paradigmatic witness, John Ellis (2000), John Durham Peters (2001; 2005), Barbie Zelizer (2002; 2007), Lilie Chouliaraki (2006; 2008), Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchveski (2009a), and others expanded what was regarded as the range of witnesses and events being witnessed. In his influential book Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (2000), Ellis argues that the twentieth century was sealed as the century of witness when television facilitated a new, generalized mode of witnessing (6–38). Ellis encapsulates this domestic form of witnessing in his eloquent and much cited sentence ‘[w]e cannot say that we do not know’, implying that media witnessing involves a certain responsibility when audiences obtain a ‘powerless knowledge and complicity’ from the safety of their homes (2000, 1). Later, Ellis has made the case that the argument unfolded in Seeing Things ‘now seem[s] inadequate’ (2009a, 73; see also 2009b; 2012). ‘We cannot say that we do not know’ might indeed be criticized for what seems to be a case of underlining assumptions that global audiences are united in the same interests, and that media representations invariably point to the same interpretations and solutions (for more on media and morality, see, e.g., Boltanski 1999; Silverstone 2007). This dictum also fails to specify what kind of complicity or responsibility media audiences should take upon themselves. Other scholars have further developed the notion of media witnessing. Most notably among these are Chouliaraki (2006; 2008), who has outlined different prototypical positions, and Frosh and Pinchevski, who have issued the inspirational volume Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (2009a), which features new essays by Peters and Ellis, among other valuable contributions (see also Ellis 2009b; 2012; Frosh and Pinchevski 2009c; Rentschler 2004; Tait 2011).

There is definitely a richness of thinking involved in the concept of media witnessing, e.g., on the position of media audiences in view of the access to still-larger amounts of mediated information. However, this book concentrates on the narrower role of the first-hand witness (but see chapter 5). The subject is delimited primarily because eyewitness images relate to first-hand witnessing. Moreover, media witnessing tends to be used as an almost all-encompassing metaphor for media representation and reception of nonfictional forms. As noted by Frosh and Pinchevski (2009b, 1), media witnessing also moves on the verge of tautology: Witnesses, on the one hand, may be thought of as media in and of themselves by transmitting their exclusive perceptions to others lacking access to the original event. Similarly, acts of witnessing are by definition mediated through the spoken or written word, and through visual, auditory, or audiovisual media technologies. On the other hand, media or mediation is almost always intended for an audience, whether real or imagined, and therefore ‘entails a kind of witnessing’ (Frosh and Pinchevski 2009b, 1). Another concern in the context of this book is that media witnessing has primarily been theorized within the remit of the mass media, and the concept cannot be transferred directly to digital media (but see Mortensen 2011b; Allan 2013; Andén-Papadopoulos 2013). Digital media shape new roles for users, but lack the ability of television to unite large audiences in shared experiences. While television has the capacity to turn media viewers into witnesses, digital media may be said to turn witnesses into produsers.

By focusing on the first-hand witness, I subscribe to John Durham Peters’ typology of four witnesses, deduced from the degree of mediation and the spatial and temporal relations to an event:

To be there, present at the event in space and time is the paradigm case. To be present in time but removed in space is the condition of liveness, simultaneity across space. To be present in space but removed in time is the condition of historical representation: here is the possibility of a simultaneity across time, a witness that laps the ages. To be absent in both space and time but still have access to an event via its traces is the condition of recording.

(Peters 2001, 720)

Peters’ distinction between four prototypical witnesses accentuates the fundamental difference between the first-hand witness’ physical presence and privileged access to events in time and space and the physical absence involved in the other forms of witnessing, which are second-hand experiences facilitated by the media making the absent in time and/or space present. The broad concept of media witnessing contains the three last-mentioned modes listed in the quote from Peters above—namely: 1) witnesses to live transmissions (present in time and removed in space), 2) witnesses to mediated historical events (present in space and removed in time), and 3) witnesses to recorded events (removed in time and space) (see Sæther 2008 for a critical discussion of this model).

If we focus our attention on the first-hand eyewitness, this figure is characterized by some basic traits. Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski (2009, 137–138) offer a definition that includes the four features presence, rhetoric, habitus, and competence, to which I would like to add relationality and subjectivity. Presence, or being where and when events happen, constitutes the sine qua non of coming forward as an eyewitness. Rhetoric is equally essential; someone must report in words or through other means of communication what took place according to his or her cognitive and/or technological recollection. Habitus, or the moral integrity of the eyewitness, is imperative too, because trustworthiness is vital to testimonies, and because traditionally only people believed to be on the ‘right’ side of history were entitled to bear witness—a point to which we shall return. Lastly, competence is necessary in order to make a public statement. I find it pertinent to supplement the characteristics of the first-hand eyewitness identified by Ashuri and Pinchevski with another two: Relationality seems to be an equally essential feature of the eyewitness, whose performance is necessarily context-specific. Different historical periods, places, circumstances, and technologies invariably enable and/or mobilize different kinds of witnesses and acts of witnessing. Finally, a sixth feature, subjectivity, is strongly present in traditional and contemporary eyewitnesses alike since testimonies are invariably presented from a subjective point of view. The personal perception and proximity of the first-hand witness cause an ‘annihilation of perspective’, as Ashuri and Pinchevski (2009, 140) note elsewhere in their book chapter, and for this reason, testimonies tend to be fragmented and incoherent. In chapter 2, the features of the eyewitness serve as a point of departure for outlining the particular characteristics of eyewitness images, which foreground the testimony and leave the traditional figure of the eyewitness in the background.

Traditions for Witnessing: Law and Religion

First-hand witnessing originates from the two overarching institutions of law and religion, as John Durham Peters (2001; 2005) and the theologian Günther Thomas (2009) have established in their work on the historical traits of the witness. In the following, the main focus is on the juridical domain, since the special position of experience and communication embodied by the contemporary first-hand witness forms a parallel to and partially derives from this tradition. Although associated with authenticity, the subjective viewpoint of the legal witness continues to raise doubt about this figure’s ability and willingness to convert experience into testimony in a direct and transparent manner. Witnessing in a legal context shares the strong similarity with the contemporary eyewitness in the news media that testimonies are called for in situations of doubt, if not disagreement or conflict.

Most legal systems have depended on the witness as an indispensable source of information (for juridical and juridical-psychological research on eyewitnesses, see e.g., Ross, Read, and Toglia 1994; Garrett 2011, 45–83). In bearing testimony, the witness holds the power to account for or even establish the otherwise unknown or uncertain course of events, identify the actors, and exert an influence in questions of guilt. Usually being a third party on the periphery of the charge and countercharge of the main protagonists (Wagner-Pacifici 2005a, 202), the eyewitness has a strong obligation legally and morally to testify, and to do so in accordance with the truth. The witness acts ‘sub poena’ (Peters 2005, 255), which means ‘under penalty’, and false testimony or refusal to deliver testimony constitutes a felony. Throughout history, methods have been developed for securing truthful witness accounts, from torture to limiting the right to and power of witnessing to individuals considered to be reliable by virtue of their gender, race, and social status. There is a long history of excluding ‘non-christians, convicts, spouses, children, the insane, slaves, and colonized people’ (Peters 2005, 251) from the witness box. From the nineteenth century, forensic science has continuously invented technologies to secure certain evidence and unambiguous identification, e.g., fingerprints, visual identification, the polygraph, and DNA-profiling (e.g., Caplan and Torpey 2001). The implementation of these methods has consistently foregrounded issues of concern regarding the protection of individuals’ legal rights, integrity, and privacy, since an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Eyewitness Images and Mediatized Conflict
• 1 The Eyewitness in the Media
• 2 Eyewitness Images as a Genre, Genres of Eyewitness Images
• 3 Mediatized Conflict
• 4 Counter-Images: Visual Censorship and the Challenges of Digital Media—The Snapshot of Fallen US Soldiers (2004) and the Bootleg Tape of Saddam Hussein’s Hanging (2006)
• 5 The Unintentional News Icon: The Canonization and Political Mobilization of the Footage of Neda Agha Soltan in the Post-Election Revolt Iran (2009)
• 6 Metacoverage and Mediatized Conflict: WikiLeaks’ Release of ‘Collateral Murder’ (2010) and the Transformation of the Information Flow
• 7 Citizen Investigation and Eyewitness Images: The Boston Marathon Bombing (2013)
• Conclusion
• References
• Index