(Crossposted from The Field.)
Andrew Sullivan - a blogger now more relevant to the international media coverage of Iran than CNN, think about that - posted a link to this video, reportedly a scene from today somewhere in Iran...
In contrast with so many other videos we've watched in recent days, there is a very friendly, almost whimsical, relationship between the demonstrators and the cops. The protesters are clearly going out of their way to encourage that, as the police officers try, but fail, to keep from smiling in front of the cameras.
From an organizer's perspective, this is exactly the tone a social movement wants to strike, when possible (that is, when the cops don't immediately come out swinging clubs and bashing heads). It's infectious. And it's the sort of dynamic that leads to those moments in history when security forces have simply refused to repress or put down a peaceful social movement.
That this video is now in your room also provokes me to repeat how tickled I am that the "people's media" - regular folk with cell phone video cameras and such - has virtually supplanted the corporate media in the international coverage of these earthshaking events.
Hour after hour, since I last mentioned it in the previous post, CNN International has been showcasing such YouTube videos as the "images the Iranian government doesn't want you to see." Fox and the rest of the networks have been doing the same.
Basically, with a few gallant exceptions, the commercial media has abandoned the terrain to the citizens' media.
When yesterday Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times,wrote Editor & Publisher's Joe Strupp about why he was leaving Iran at this key moment in history, he basically waved a white flag of surrender:
"Briefly, I came to watch our reporters in action and to get a (first) taste of a big subject. I try to get out in the field as often as I can, because nothing else gives you as good a sense of the complexities and texture of a story.
"I usually don't write on these trips, but this story got so big, and the correspondents were so welcoming of an extra pair of hands, that I plunged in. It reminds me why I got into this business. (Also, no one here wants to talk about the future of the newspaper business.)..."
"i'm writing, and it's getting late. my visa's up tomorrow and i have to go.
"the iranians watch us closely, seem to know where we are much of the time. yesterday i took a five-hour drive to isfahan, in western iran (details TK in the nyt) and on the way we stopped to take a peek at the holy city of qom. as we were making a loop through that city, my translator got a call on his cell phone from the ministry that oversees the press: "please tell me, what is your program in qom.'
"some reporters have contemplated overstaying their visas, trying to work under the radar. even if you manage to elude the authorities, though, you create real dangers for all the iranians you would need to hide you, translate for you, get you around and help you get the story out.
"gotta go."
Hello? Is there anybody home at the New York Times? As one who has reported from dangerous conflict zones again and again, I can say that you can safely ignore Keller's "concern" for Iranians that might be endangered by his presence. Shouldn't that really be the decision of the unnamed Iranians that want accurate news about the events in their country reported to the world and are risking their lives to get the word out with or without shepherding NY Timesmen around?
Somebody has to say it. Might as well be me. It's Bill Keller who is the coward here. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out of Iran, Bill!
Can you imagine John Reed or Webb Miller or George Orwell or Oriana Fallaci or And rew Kopkind or Mario Menendez or any of the other great journalists of their times using local people as an excuse to flee the scene of the crime? Hell, I've worked over the past dozen years throughout Latin America with journalists that know exactly how to embed with social movements without placing greater dangers on them. We do it all the time. Maybe Keller needs to attend our School of Authentic Journalism to learn that. Nobody apparently ever taught him. And he's the Ayatollah of the New York Fucking Times!
And yet I welcome Keller's flight and that of all the others. Because this week they are proving, finally, that all their claims of recent months about why "real newspapers" and "real journalists" are needed to cover the affairs of the world more than Internet or citizen journalists are a great big self-serving lie. They're completely impotent before the events in Iran. They're reduced to posting YouTube videos, and quoting Twitter tweets, made by people who will risk their lives with or without them tagging along.
The events in Iran this week, in addition to all the very important matters at stake, are also demonstrating for the world why the profit-driven media is incapable of serving society during these times and why it has become so very obs olete.
And for that, too, we owe a debt of gratitude to the people in the streets, especially the citizen journalists, more "real journalist" than Bill Keller and his generation of corporate clone-warriors that destroyed journalism in the United States have ever been.
Update: Without a suggestion of intentional irony, this, from a New York Times story from last night (mostly about Twitter, Twitter and more Twitter):
As their visas expired, journalists were looking for any chance to report. Jim Marshall, the last Sky News staff member in Tehran, was barred from reporting, so he went shopping instead and came upon thousands of supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a rally.
“I kept shopping, and they kept demonstrating,” he wrote in a blog post. “This was turning into a test of wills. How much longer could I shop without slipping into reporting?” Once he realized he was carrying a notepad in his pocket, he swiftly left the scene.
Oh, lordy: I'm reminded of the late 1990s, when 400 journalists and human rights observers were expelled from Mexico for reporting from indigenous Zapatista communities without a journalism visa. Every single one of them - and many, many more that never got caught - assumed the risks that the shopping Sky News reporter was not willing to assume.
And yet the Times reporters, Mark Landler and Brian Stelter, who penned those words are apparently completely oblivious to just how badly those two paragraphs shine on the entire profession. It's seen as cute that the alleged journalist went shopping at the mall. And, ooh, he had a spiral notebook in his pocket so he had to run away! Since when did the lack of a work visa prevent any journalist worth his and her salt from getting a piece of the biggest story of the moment? Say what you want about the corrupt and disgraced Timeswoman Judith Miller: at least she understood that getting arrested could become a career move. But where do they get these other losers?
It's that commercial news organizations and the official J-schools that serve as their greenhouses are primarily dedicated to beating all the passion out of reporters before they even get to be reporters. Swashbucklers or authentic pioneers need not apply. And that, in a nutshell, explains the death of the newspaper industry. Shop 'til you drop, kids, cuz' you're going to drop very soon.
Update II: Booman - who sees a much wider picture here than most - reminds that Timesman Bill Keller's report from Iran (his first "journalistic" report in how many years?) was "180 degrees wrong" on its major point - his portrayal of the supposed unity in a ruling theocracy that is wracked right now by an apocalyptic power struggle - and demonstrably so. The masters of the "traditional media" are becoming parodies of themselves.