When 24 hour news organizations are motivated primarily by profit making – everything becomes newsworthy, even YouTube. When foreign bureaus are closed, international reporting curtailed, and visual content is ratcheted to ever-higher levels… newsrooms begin to steal from amateur video bloggers from around the globe as legitimate journalistic content. And what better place to find eyeball catching content than YouTube.
But deep problems exist with this kind of reporting, and CNN even acknowledges some of them here:
1. “CNN cannot independently confirm the authenticity of the origin of this material (nonetheless it is pretty compelling stuff)…apparently from a 14 year old.”
2. “This apparently taken from Haifa…the video quality on some of these is not great and you can see that just looking at it, it’s a bit grainy.”
3. “The fact that is so easily recorded, posted on the internet, and of course the quality not so great. But, some pretty amazing stuff that’s able to be captured pretty easily.”
4. “Some pretty amazing stuff, and this apparently taken from a rooftop in Beirut.”
What happens to journalism when YouTube performs as a ”funnel, and the filter.” YouTube, interestingly, is not responding to how “they are dealing with some of this video, whether they are filtering it, what they are taking down, where they draw the line in terms of how gruesome some of this video is,”
Video blogging is not journalism. And journalism is not rebroadcasting content from YouTube. So then, what is valid accurate news today? And from where does it come? If news organizations do not adhere to their own tenets of journalism – who will? Citizen journalists? Doubtful... but it is happening more and more.
21/03/08