Digital Media and Reporting Conflict

Blogging and the BBC's Coverage of War and Terrorism

Daniel Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136688072
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Marketing numérique

This book explores the impact of new forms of online reporting on the BBC's coverage of war and terrorism. Informed by the views of over 100 BBC staff at all levels of the corporation, Bennett captures journalists' shifting attitudes towards blogs and internet sources used to cover wars and other conflicts. He argues that the BBC's practices and values are fundamentally evolving in response to the challenges of immediate digital publication. Ongoing challenges for journalism in the online media environment are identified: maintaining impartiality in the face of calls for more open personal journalism; ensuring accuracy when the power of the "former audience" allows news to break at speed; and overcoming the limits of the scale of the BBC's news operation in order to meet the demands to present news as conversation.

While the focus of the book is on the BBC's coverage of war and terrorism, the conclusions are more widely relevant to the evolving practice of journalism at traditional media organizations as they grapple with a revolution in publication.

Part I

1 The ‘War and Terror’ Blogosphere

On 22 October 2008, the BBC’s Technology Correspondent wrote a blog post titled ‘Is blogging dead?’ The irony was not lost on Rory Cellan-Jones:

According to an article in Wired Magazine, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook make blogs look ‘so 2004’. Oh dear. My response was to go straight home—and write a blog post.¹

In the Wired article cited by Cellan-Jones, commentator Paul Boutin urged readers not to start a blog. For Boutin, blogs were not what they used to be. ‘The blogosphere’, he argued, was ‘once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought’.² By 2008, it had ‘been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths’.³

In addition to the entry of the official, the corporate and the professional, Boutin argued that blogs were too text-heavy compared to the new social networks on offer. The development and spread of faster broadband Internet connections made photo and video sharing on sites such as Flickr and YouTube more accessible. Meanwhile, microblogging in the form of the ‘status update’ on social networks like Facebook and dedicated sites such as Twitter attracted burnt out bloggers. But other commentators suggested that the convergence of blogging with these new forms of Internet communication and those which already existed would help reignite blogging. By 2011, blog functionality had developed to such an extent that it was possible to build a substantial, multiple-page website using blogging software, blurring the boundaries between what had previously been identifiable as distinct Internet genres. Blogging might have been entering a new era, but it was only ‘dead’ in the sense that it had become ubiquitous as a variety of individuals, organisations, companies and governments adopted the format or emerging variations.

Blogs in the field of war and terrorism did not remain untouched by these general trends. This chapter chronicles some of the key stages in the development of blogs in this area and identifies several categories of blogs and bloggers that might be of particular interest to journalists. Indeed, the aim is not to identify categories based on statistical sampling but to consider the question from the perspective of working journalists by outlining which sources of information are available to them and the opportunities and challenges these blogs present to their journalism. This approach draws on David Altheide’s notion of ‘progressive theoretical sampling’,⁴ whereby a researcher is able to select categories which are more theoretically or conceptually relevant by gaining a deep understanding of the topic. In order to achieve this, a mixture of methods was employed including a consideration of the academic literature, the incorporation of trends identified from interviews with BBC journalists and the immersion of the researcher in the blogosphere.

So-called citizen journalists have written about their experiences of war and terrorism using blogs since the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.⁵ As blogs evolved and merged with other genres, eyewitnesses to major news events could publish material using a variety of multimedia tools. Interested individuals also collated news articles, blog posts, Twitter updates and imagery using their own ‘live blogs’. The experience of those involved in conflict could be amplified by diasporic bloggers—such as Lebanese living abroad during the Second Lebanon War—or by a network of bloggers like the military blogging community in the US. Independent journalists, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and activists began using blogs as a means of communicating stories outside traditional media spaces highlighting the plight of victims of conflict. Militaries adopted blogs as a tool to explain their operations and the experiences of their servicemen and -women, while specialist defence and security reporters, analysts and academics updated blogs which covered issues surrounding war and terrorism in detail.

This chapter demonstrates that these blogs and bloggers provide opportunities for journalists to access eyewitness accounts to conflict, background information, military news, and specialist and expert comment. But they also present challenges to traditional journalism: a number of blogs are deliberately written in order to present an alternative picture to existing media narratives; specialist blogs can highlight deficiencies in journalists’ content; other blogs can be co-opted as tools for public relations or propaganda campaigns; and networks of bloggers can actively pressurise journalists who are deemed to be inaccurate or biased.

This chapter provides a backdrop to the book outlining which blogs are available to BBC journalists, how blogs concerning war and terrorism have evolved in the 21st century and why blogs represent a challenge to traditional news narratives of war.

BLOGS FROM WAR ZONES AND WITNESSING TERROR

The mobile phone and the Internet have formed the vanguard of a revolution in communications technology by which the ability to publish information has been distributed to a much wider group of people.⁶ Anybody with access to these technologies can participate in instant global publication via the World Wide Web. In practice, most people publish information over the Web to a relatively small audience and a few websites dominate Internet traffic, but the potential to reach larger audiences is often only one hyperlink away. Individuals caught up in conflict or terror attacks often seek to communicate their shock, anxiety, grief, suffering and pain. Blogs have been used by eyewitnesses to major news events to document their experiences sometimes catapulting their blogs to a larger audience. Throughout the first decade of the 21st century these accounts have provided an alternative to news and information available in media organisations. They have also been incorporated by the traditional media into their coverage.

During the Kosovo war, the word blog was yet to receive mainstream recognition,⁷ but then the development of easy-to-use blogging software, such as Blogger and LiveJournal, was in its infancy in mid-1999.⁸ The people communicating on the Web about the war in Kosovo were not using blogs but were instead updating their own webpages, writing emails or using message boards and chatrooms. Relief organisations were also updating websites with news from the bombing zones. International journalists had been ordered to leave Serbia in March 1999,⁹ and many journalists were forced to rely on emails being sent to them from the ground. A Serbian monk, Father Hieromonk Sava, provided firsthand accounts suggesting that NATO’s bombing campaign was not as precise as it was claiming. The emails of a 16-year-old Albanian Muslim girl in Kosovo were read out on CBS News. Nenad Ćosić, a graphic designer in Belgrade, published time-stamped email updates of NATO airstrikes in a style which might now be referred to as a ‘live blog’.¹⁰ These personal accounts offered a different perspective from the ‘narrow prism of views’ and the ‘ubiquitous aerial photos’ available on network news.¹¹

By 2001, ‘weblogging’ was beginning to emerge. The use of blogs by individuals to document their reaction to the events of September 11 pointed towards a future in which they would play a more significant role in the reporting of news events.¹² James Marino, for example, had been updating a blog-style celebrity news and gossip website in New York on the day that al-Qaida operatives flew two planes into the towers of the World Trade Center.¹³ Marino had a view of the towers from his office window and as he watched the events of that morning unfold, he continued to update his website. He offered short updates which provided a mixture of factual information and emotional response to what he was seeing. Marino demonstrated that eyewitnesses to the news did not have to be mediated by traditional media organisations in order for their accounts to be accessed.

As the use of blogs became more widespread the potential for a blogger to be documenting a newsworthy event increased. During the Iraq war, a number of Iraqis began blogging about their experiences of life in a conflict zone. Bloggers such as Salam Pax, Riverbend and Healing Iraq attracted significant audiences as media attention focused on the country. Their accounts provided access to voices offering a more nuanced view of the conflicting hopes and aspirations of many Iraqis. They drew readers into a world unfettered by editorial restrictions, traditional media frames, news values and agendas.¹⁴

By the middle of the decade, blogs written by eyewitnesses to news events had caused a number of journalists to reconsider their scepticism of the value of blogging. Bloggers provided accounts of the tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004, the London bombings in July 2005, the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Commentators regularly referred to this phenomenon as one aspect of ‘citizen journalism’, and bloggers were problematically labelled ‘citizen journalists’.¹⁵ Bloggers often did not see themselves as journalists, and their blog posts were not of broader media significance until a news event occurred in their vicinity. Many bloggers were only acting as journalists or reporters for short periods of time or at a particular stage in the journalistic process. They committed ‘random acts of journalism’ which, in some cases unwittingly, led to much wider fame.¹⁶ Nevertheless, their inclusion in media reports meant online news was becoming ‘a collaborative endeavour, engendering a heightened sense of locality’.¹⁷

As the number of bloggers grew, other bloggers began collating, curating, aggregating and organising their posts. Often these were small topic focused blogs. Jeffrey Schuster, for example, started Iraqi Bloggers Central to help him track the Iraqi blogosphere,¹⁸ but more substantial projects also emerged. In 2005, Harvard fellows Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon founded a blog called Global Voices to collect blog posts from bloggers all over the world on one site. Their starting point was a belief in freedom of expression and an awareness that the traditional media did not always reflect various strands of thought. Relying on volunteers, Global Voices aimed to ‘redress some of the inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens’ media’.¹⁹ The project is maintained by a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators.

EYEWITNESSES IN THE EVOLVING DIGITAL MEDIA LANDSCAPE

Towards the end of the decade blogging was diversifying and eyewitness material could be found on a variety of Internet platforms. Images and videos which were initially uploaded on websites such as Flickr, Vimeo and YouTube were embedded into blog posts and other websites. The widespread incorporation of a camera, which takes both still and moving images into mobile phone technology, has meant that people are potentially continuously in a position to capture images of a breaking news event and upload them within minutes to the Web. In the aftermath of the attacks on Mumbai in November 2008, Vinukumar Ranganathan uploaded photos of damaged and bloodstained streets to Flickr which were more widely distributed by bloggers and news organisations.

YouTube played a significant role in the Iran election crisis in 2009 providing access to imagery which otherwise would have been unavailable. The disturbing raw footage of Neda Agha-Soltan, a female demonstrator who was killed in a government crackdown on protesters and who was filmed as she died on a street in Tehran, became synonymous with the cause of the reformist movement. After the Moscow metro system was attacked by two female suicide bombers in March 2010, a video was uploaded on YouTube by photographer Alexey Baranov which showed people evacuating Park Kultury metro station where one of the bombs exploded. The viewer could see dead passengers strewn across the platform and inside a train. The video appeared on a number of Russian LiveJournal blogs and was used by France24’s website.²⁰ During the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa in 2011, videos shot by activists, uploaded onto YouTube and incorporated into traditional media news coverage documented the often bloody struggle for political change. The pictures of Tunisians toppling President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali helped inspire Egyptians to occupy Tahrir Square to remove Hosni Mubarak from power, while activists successfully bypassed attempts by the governments in Libya and Syria to suppress media coverage of these countries’ civil wars.

Microblogging, particularly on Twitter, but also via the status update feature of Facebook, is another method for eyewitnesses to news events to quickly relay information. Twitter limits users to only 140 characters encouraging brevity and immediacy. The service rapidly became a hub for breaking news and acted as an unofficial and customisable wire service. After a series of bomb blasts in Bangalore killed two people in July 2008, technology entrepreneur Mukund Mohan demonstrated how Twitter could be used to provide real time updates in the context of a terror attack. Mohan travelled to the scene where one of the bombs had exploded and acted as a reporter speaking to eyewitnesses and the police.²¹ At first, he used his mobile phone to update his Twitter account, but a slow Internet connection speed made it difficult to keep up with all the information he was receiving.²² He decided to collect several mobile phone numbers of contacts at the blast sites before returning to a nearby office to continue to update his Twitter feed on his PC. It was probably the first example of Twitter being used as a reporting tool by a ‘citizen journalist’ to cover a terror attack.

Twitter updates can be incorporated into blogs or websites, but particularly in the context of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction The Impact of Blogging on the BBC's Coverage of War and Terrorism
• Part I
• 1 The ‘War and Terror' Blogosphere
• Part II
• 2 Blogs ‘Rumour, Prejudice and Gossip' or ‘Standard’ BBC Source?
• 3 Reporting Conflict from News Needles in Digital Haystacks
• 4 Information Overload, the 24/7 News Cycle and the Turn to Twitter
• Part III
• 5 ‘Outside the BBC Universe?' Blogging at the BBC
• 6 ‘Can You Teach Granddad How to Dance?' Involving the Audience on BBC Programme Blogs
• Part IV
• 7 ‘Live Blogging' Terror The BBC's Coverage of the Attacks on Mumbai
• 8 Reporting Conflict War in Gaza and the Limits of the News Revolution
• Conclusion The Two Faces of Janus—The Future of Journalism
• Appendix A Code Book for Content Analysis of BBC's Mumbai Live Updates
• Appendix B A Note on Methodology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index