Bearing witness: citizen journalism and human rights issues

Abstract

This article assesses the potential of online news reporting to create discursive spaces for emphatic engagement—of bearing witness—at a distance, especially where human rights violations are concerned. Taking as its focus the emergent forms and practices of citizen journalism, it examines the spontaneous actions of ordinary people compelled to adopt the role of news reporter in order to bear witness to human suffering. Specifically, findings derived from three case studies of citizen journalism are presented: 1) the 2004 South Asian Tsunami; 2) human rights abuses in India's north‐east region; and 3) the Palestinian Crisis in the Occupied Territories. In each instance, it is argued, citizen journalism engendered new approaches to eyewitness reporting, a process shown to have important implications for challenging familiar ‘us and them’ dichotomies in news reports.

Keywords:

• Citizen journalism
• internet
• human rights
• tsunami
• India
• Israel‐Palestine

Acknowledgement

We would like to express our gratitude to the editor of this Special Issue and the anonymous referees for their helpful advice on the first draft of this paper.

Notes

1. A blog (short for ‘weblog’) may be characterised as a diary, journal or personal account—often supplemented with images—prepared by individuals with access to the Internet and in possession of the necessary software publishing tools to establish an online presence. Bloggers typically pull together their resources from a diverse array of links to other websites, thereby situating a given news event within a larger context, and illuminating multiple dimensions of its elements (see Allan, 2006).

2. The UNICEF (2007) report breaks this figure down by gender, with 97% of all males and 88% of all females being literate (http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/oPt_statistics.html#31).

3. Internet World Stats published these statistics on 11 January 2007 (internetworldstats.com).

4. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics is a statistical organisation with the Palestinian National Authority government. Its main function is to provide accurate, official statistics on various aspects of Palestinian life for government, citizens and business (see pcbs.gov.ps). Both reports are available from that website.

5. This survey conducted for the AIC asked a general question about individual Internet use rather than within the household and thus came up with a higher figure than the PCBS statistics in both 2004 and 2006.

6. Ali Abunimah is a Palestinian journalist living in Chicago. Arjan el Fassed is a human rights policy advisor for an international development organisation now living in The Netherlands. Laurie King‐Irani is former editor of Middle East Report, a trained anthropologist and writer living in Washington, DC. Nigel Parry was a web‐designer at Birzeit University, West Bank, and alternative media campaigner, who now lives in New York.

7. Israelis claimed that this operation was essential to tracking down terror suspects (Katz, 2007).

8. Palestine Blogs is a pro‐Palestinian aggregator blog that collects ‘news and views from Palestine’ and Palestinian blogs from around the world (see palestineblogs.org).