After CNN was widely lambasted for airing mostly pre-taped domestic non-news over the weekend of June 13th while the upheaval in Iran was being documented in an up-to-the-minute fashion via social networking sites like Twitter, the television news network attempted to atone for that error by mostly staying live with the story during this past weekend of June 20th. The circumstances, however, were still the same: the Iranian government was preventing outlets like CNN from being able to do any first-hand reporting, and social networks were still the only source of up to date information. This put the network in the unenviable situation of having little choice but to “report” what already being publicly posted to these sites while making an attempt an attempt to provide the kind of analysis and perspective that would make watching CNN more valuable than simply keeping ones eyes glued directly to Twitter.
While I continued to follow the Iran situation on Twitter this weekend as I had the last, this time I went ahead and left CNN on in the background, mainly out of curiosity over how the network would approach such a unique situation. Considering the manner in which its own reporters were handicapped from being able to do their jobs, I thought CNN’s coverage was at times admirable and at other times self-serving, and yet I kept watching. Having taken in most of it, I’ve come up with a few pointers for CNN that might help their coverage to come off as more legitimate the next time they find themselves in such a situation, which is likely to happen more and more often as citizen journalists continue to find their way into situations where full-fledged reporters can’t officially tread:
1. Having your reporters people’s Twitter posts on-air in real time, and mentioning that there’s no way to guarantee that any of those posts are accurate, seems fair enough. But you don’t need to repeatedly remind us of the debatable authenticity of such posts every few minutes, as it gives the appearance that you’re simultaneously relying on Twitter as a source and telling us that Twitter is not a legitimate source. Whether you’re intending it or not, the implication is that someone listening to a CNN employee reading random Twitter posts about Iran is somehow more legitimate than someone reading those same posts directly on Twitter. It comes off as nothing more than you guys hoping we won’t connect the dots and turn off the television and fire up Twitter.com ourselves. If that’s not your intention, then tone down your rhetoric about how unreliable these Twitter posts are.
2. At one point this weekend you reported what Mousavi had posted to his official Facebook page as being something that he “allegedly” said, as if the mere fact that he had said it through Facebook meant that it was automatically suspect. It’s been well-documented that Mousavi’s page on Facebook really is him, so where does the questionable authenticity come into play? If you have reason to suspect that his Facebook page has been hacked or compromised, then report on that. Otherwise, stop using the word “allegedly” in an attempt to imply that the words Mousavi posted to his Facebook page aren’t necessarily his words. Are you just upset that he bypassed you guys and posted his announcement directly to the internet instead of calling you guys up on the phone and allowing you to report his words on his behalf?
3. You also need to let go of the idea that any video shot by someone other than one of your own cameramen is automatically of dubious legitimacy. We all know that videos can be filmed out of context or downright faked. We’ve all gone to the movie theater and watched aliens knock down the Statue of Liberty, and we don’t walk out of the theater believing that it really happened. We get it. So when you aired a video of a house being raided, you didn’t need to refer to the house as being “allegedly” raided. We understand that you want to play it safe in terms of hastily accusing someone of doing something, which is why you refer to someone as an “alleged murderer” if they haven’t yet been found guilty, because maybe it turns out someone else did it and the guy was innocent and you’ve unfairly branded him as a murderer which ruins his life, and he sues your pants off in return. But how does that apply to a video of a house being raided? Are you afraid that after the house raiders are done raiding houses, they’re going to come over here and sue you? It’s fine that you want to differentiate to viewers whether the video being aired is from one of your own cameramen or from an unknown third party, but acting as if what’s happening in the video isn’t even real, and then slapping the words “Amateur Video” in the upper right hand corner, suggests that you’re just a little bitter over the fact that you couldn’t get your camera crews in there to film it yourselves. How about taking a more diplomatic approach by labeling such clips simply as “Third Party Video” or some other such phrase that doesn’t imply that the video came from an untrustable thirteen year old kid.
4. The long-standing system of professional journalists relying on their own pet sources for information, in which a source’s willingness to provide information is directly proportional to the reporter’s willingness to keep their identity a secret, has long allowed professional journalists to be the arbiters of what we get to know about. We’re all aware that journalists routinely have off the record conversations with sources, and we all know that what they actually report to us is often a mere fraction of what they actually know. We grudgingly accept it only because if a journalist reports the full story and betrays a source in the process, that source and other sources will be less likely to share any information with that journalist in the future, and maybe we lose out on a more important story down the road. But none of that applies when your “sources” are posting their information to a public website and we’re getting the information from the sources at the same time the journalists are. The long-standard voodoo of “this is what we can report to you, we can’t tell you where any of it came from, but trust us because this source told us the truth once before” doesn’t apply when the source material is immediately available to the public. In these situations you don’t have any more access to information than we do, so don’t pretend you do. Your best bet here is to help us make sense of that information, not to try to sell us on the phony notion that we can only get the information from you.
5. Furthermore, when sources are public, there’s no need to protect their identity. There was one embarrassing episode in which your reporters were displaying Twitter posts from inside Iran but blocking out the Twitter usernames and saying that you were doing so in order to protect the identities of those individuals. Anyone familiar with Twitter knows how easy it is to search for a chunk of text and very quickly match that up to who posted it. Are so you completely unfamiliar with the concept of Twitter search that you really think you’re protecting these people’s identities, or are you just trying to sell your viewers on the vague notion that you’re somehow exercising discretion?
6. It would cost you a ton of money to stay live on the air 24/7, and in a lot of instances your live late-night coverage would consist of little more than a re-reading of the same stories from earlier in the evening with no change. So it’s understandable that not all of what you’re airing is live, and some of it is just a rebroadcast of your earlier coverage. But while that coverage might still be up-to-date two hours later, it might not. So if you’re airing a rebroadcast of your earlier coverage, it’s only fair that you clue us in on that by tagging it as “prerecorded” somewhere on the screen. We’ve seen you do just that when you rebroadcast Larry King’s show in the middle of the night, but that’s only because you don’t want people trying to call in to the show hours after it’s already concluded. How about giving us the same fair warning when you’re airing a news report that might no longer be up to date? Yes, that might drive some of us over to Twitter at 2:00am to get our hands on more updated information once we realize that what we’re watching on CNN is hours old. But that’s the risk you take by being up front with your viewers. And going down that road only works if you go all the way down that road.
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In all I thought CNN’s coverage this weekend was a largely admirable effort, under conditions that were far less than ideal and far different than a television news network is typically accustomed to dealing with. It was particularly interesting to watch the on-air reporters honestly trying to figure out how to proceed into this new territory, and seemingly getting more comfortable with it as the weekend went on. More of the population finds its way onto the social networks by the day, so if television news networks want to survive then they’ll have to learn how to coexist in a way that adds value and quality to the freeflow of news and information that comes from social networks rather than merely watering down that information while disparaging the source.
If that is indeed the future of television news networks, then what we saw this past weekend on CNN may have been an awkward first step in the right direction.
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