In the Apr. 20 LEDE column on the New York Times website, Robert Mackey discussed the coverage of the Arab uprising.
Latest Updates on the Uprisings in Libya and Syria
About half way down, Mackey takes on videos by citizern journalists posted at YouTube and simialr sites from the fighting.
He talks about the motivation behind the postings:
In many cases, activists do so to make sure that there is some record of those deaths in countries where the professional media is partly or entirely controlled by the governments whose security forces have done the killing. In others, such as in Libya, government opponents are compiling what they see as important evidence of crimes against humanity, and some of those images have already been reviewed by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, who has warned Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and his commanders that they could end up in court after the war.
Mackey then noted that many journalists view these feeds — along with text messages about the fighting — as part of their reporting.
One of those people is Andy Carvin, a social media reporter for National Public Radio, who uses his Twitter feed to sift through the evidence of protests and combat found online and alert his followers to new information posted on the Web each day.
On Wednesday, Mr. Carvin, like other reporters following Libyan opposition Web sites, came across bloody video posted on Facebook shot the same day in a medical center in the besieged Libyan city of Misurata. As Mr. Carvin explains in a blog post written a short time ago, the video showed what appeared to be the body of a British photographer who was killed in Misurata on Wednesday, Tim Hetherington, and graphic images of two other photographers, Chris Hondros and Guy Martin, who were seriously wounded in the attack that killed Mr. Hetherington.
Mackey quoted Carvin's blog about the internal ethical debate he had with himself before he linked to the videos:
I have posted hundreds of videos of war casualties since all of this started in Tunisia, many of them much more graphic and horrifying than this one. I’ve said countless times that people have a choice whether to view such content. They have a choice whether to follow me on Twitter, and they have a secondary choice as to whether they should view the actual content. In many cases I tell people they *shouldn’t* watch it because it is so horrific. But I post it nonetheless because I believe it is important to document what happens during wartime and to give people the choice to bear witness.
War does not discriminate: it can claim the young, the old; men and women; soldiers and civilians. And in this case, journalists. Some people have suggested to me that I shouldn’t share the link to the video because they were journalists, and that we know people who knew them in person. I too know a number of people who were very close to these men. But all the other people that have been documented as casualties during these attacks, they all had people who knew them and loved them. Yet we shared footage of them nonetheless, again because of that desire to bear witness.
Lastly, I have to consider who they are and what they do for a living. They’re professional war photographers. It’s their job to document the horrors of war, including the dead and injured. As fate would have it, they are now among the casualties.
In the end he decided posting a link to the video was the right thing.
Ultimately it boils down to this: I feel like I would be an absolute hypocrite if I didn’t share this video. So here it is. I don’t know if it will even be online much longer. Either way, it is your choice to view it or not.
The SPJ Code of Ethics discusses at length the kind of thinking a journalist should go through before reporting something that might affect other people. (See the whole section: Minimize Harm)
So your comments? Was Carvin right to link to the video as part of his reporting on the Arab uprisings?
You can follow Carvin's Twitter feeds at @acarvin.