"Bearing Witness in Real Time:" The Impact of Social Media on Journalism

On July 27, 2014 media journalist David Carr published a column in The New York Times, entitled "At Front Lines, Bearing Witness in Real Time." The column was of special interest for its historical perspective on the rapidly evolving influence of social media on journalism. From it I quote:

"Geopolitics and the ubiquity of social media have made the world a smaller, gorier place. If Vietnam brought war into the living room, the last few weeks have put it at our fingertips. On our phones, news alerts full of body counts bubble into our inbox, Facebook feeds are populated by appeals for help or action on behalf of victims, while Twitter boils with up-to-the-second reporting, some by professionals and some by citizens, from scenes of disaster and chaos.

"Then came radio reports in World War II, with the sounds of bombs in the background, closing the distance between men who fought wars and those for whom they were fighting. Vietnam was the first war to leak into many American living rooms, albeit delayed by the limits of television technology at the time. CNN put all viewers on a kind of war footing, with its live broadcasts from the first gulf war in 1991.

"But in the current news ecosystem, we don’t have to wait for the stentorian anchor to arrive and set up shop. Even as some legacy media outfits have pulled back, new players like  Vice and BuzzFeed have stepped in to sometimes remarkable effect. Citizen reports from the scene are quickly augmented by journalists. And those journalistic boots on the ground begin writing about what they see, often via Twitter, before consulting with headquarters about what it all means. . . ."

"Bearing witness is the oldest and perhaps most valuable tool in the journalist’s arsenal, but it becomes something different delivered in the crucible of real time, without pause for reflection. It is unedited, distributed rapidly and globally, and immediately responded to by the people formerly known as the audience.

 "It has made for a more visceral, more emotional approach to reporting. War correspondents arriving in a hot zone now provide an on-the-spot moral and physical inventory that seems different from times past. That emotional content, so noticeable when Anderson Cooper was reporting from the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, has now become routine, part of the real-time picture all over the web.

 "The absence of the conventional layers of journalism — correspondents filing reports that are then edited for taste and accuracy — has gotten several journalists in trouble, mostly for responding in the moment to what they saw in front of them."