Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

By Rima Abdelkader

CNN was the only television news outlet to report from inside Iraq when the Persian Gulf War struck in 1991.  Seventeen years later, sophisticated technologies and the Web replaced America’s major television network as the premier place for news in the attack on Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel.

People reported the attacks as soon as it happened through these revolutionary devices.  They supplied continued updates and analysis while CNN regrettably was forced to defer to its Indian affiliate station IBN for coverage due to a reported expired license.  When CNN correspondents reported the attacks over the phone, I quickly turned online.

I wasn’t the only one.  People all around the world were.  Mobile phones, SMS texting, the South Asian American Journalists Association, micro-blogging site Twitter, and blogs like Mumbai Help and Global Voices offered extensive exclusive coverage of the attacks.  The victims even turned to some of these devices to find relatives and to seek immediate emergency relief.

India, Manoj Kanojia, 27, cries as he speaks to his mother on the phone at a hospital in Mumbai, India, Saturday, Nov. 29, 2008. Manoj suffered two bullet injuries in Wednesday's shooting at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai. A 60-hour terror rampage that killed at least 195 people across India's financial capital ended Saturday when commandos killed the last three gunmen inside a luxury hotel while it was engulfed in flames. (AP Photo/Gautam Singh)

Sumita Batra, 39, right, and her daughter Maya, 13, receive text messages from a friend who is in Mumbai for the holiday season, as she monitors the news on Thursday, Nov. 27 2008, at her home in Artesia, Calif. Batra, who is originally form India, owns a chain of Indian-influenced beauty salons in Southern California. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

A foreign tourist breaks down after being rescued safely from a hotel following an attack in Mumbai in Mumbai, India, Wednesday night, Nov. 26, 2008. Teams of heavily armed gunmen stormed luxury hotels, a popular restaurant, hospitals and a crowded train station in coordinated attacks across India's financial capital Wednesday night, killing at least 78 people and taking Westerners hostage, police said. (AP Photo)

A relative of the Holtzberg family, Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman, speaks on the phone at the Holtzberg family house in the northern Israeli city of Afula, Thursday, Nov. 27, 2008. Relatives of an Israeli couple trapped in a Jewish center taken over by gunmen in the Indian city of Mumbai gathered in prayer at a family home on Thursday, desperately trying to find out whether their loved ones were safe. The family of Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife, Rivki, said they knew nothing beyond reports that the couple's 2-year-old son had been rescued, but four people in the building were "unconscious." (AP Photo/Dan Balilty)

The Huffington Post asked CNN’s Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour or “Wherever there’s war, there’s Amanpour” for her view of citizen journalists and bloggers and whether she utilizes them in her coverage.

Though Amanpour recognized the importance of bloggers and citizen journos especially “in closed societies such as Burma,” she believed that “no matter how sophisticated the delivery platform,” she didn’t think there was or should be a substitute for professional journalism.

Professional journalism “comes with training, with experience, with credibility, with developing trust based on the accuracy of your record in the field,” the war correspondent said.

I agree, but I don’t think the question is about substitution.

My professor Sandeep Junnakar raised a noteworthy perspective in class on Thursday.  As journalists, he thought, we have to learn how to be credible and trusted curators of citizen journalism.  I agree.

I learned first-hand the effect of these sophisticated technologies on the victims themselves while I was in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.  One student said she deferred to Facebook to contact her friends and classmates when she couldn’t reach them over the phone.

Amanpour, however, is right to point out Burma as an example where citizen journalism and blogging is vital (or Myanmar, as the U.N. calls it).  Bloggers inside that country offered exclusive coverage during and after the cyclone while journalists, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and his humanitarian envoy John Holmes had to request a visa to visit the hardest-hit areas from Cyclone Nargis.  The U.N. Chief wrote two letters at one point after Senior General Than Swe ignored his repeated phone calls.

The effect of the Mumbai attacks has not only transformed coverage of conflict globally, but even the way emergency relief is accessed.  The Mumbai victims turned to these sophisticated devices quicker than they did to CNN.  That’s groundbreaking.

Colin Powell, Ben Affleck, Campbell Brown Reject Use of Arab/Muslim as Slur

By Rima Abdelkader

Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell demonstrated on Sunday that he too can be a maverick.  The moderate Republican not only endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for president, but also expressed his dismay with what he called an unwarranted connection with “some kind of terrorist feelings” and the Illinois senator by John McCain’s campaign.  He, like CNN’s Campbell Brown and Hollywood actor Ben Affleck recently, set the record straight about Obama’s background.  He is not an Arab nor a Muslim, but so what if he was?

“Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?” Powell rhetorically asked on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press (see minute 4:28).  “The answer’s no, that’s not America.” 

Hollywood actor Ben Affleck expressed a similar sentiment on Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday (see minute 5:16). 

Affleck referred back to McCain’s response to a woman at one of his rallies who said she did not trust his opponent because he was allegedly an Arab.  “He’s a decent family man that I happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues,” McCain told her.

“What if somebody said to you, “I heard that he was a Jew?” and I said, “No, he is not a Jew, he’s alright?”” Affleck asked Maher’s audience, which laughed after quickly catching on to his demonstrated absurdity of the question.  Affleck gave another example using Catholic.

“Arab and good person are not antithetical to one another,” Affleck emphasized, drawing applause.

“This prejudice that we have allowed to fester in this campaign, where we have allowed this idea—denying the fact that Obama who yes is not an Arab nor is he a Muslim—but, we have allowed that to turn into the acceptance of both of those things as a legitimate slur is really a problem,” he told Maher, “These are not slurs.  They are categories of human being.  They are not slurs of people and no one in the media stood up and said that.”

But, CNN’s Campbell Brown did so this past week on 13 October on her show.  While commending McCain for correcting his supporter, Brown rhetorically asked, “So what if he was?”

“We can’t tolerate this ignorance, not in the media, not on the campaign trail.  Of course he’s not an Arab.  Of course he’s not a Muslim, but, honestly, it shouldn’t matter,” Campbell told her viewers.

Powell agreed before giving a poignant story of a Muslim American from New Jersey who gave up his life to serve in Iraq for America:

“I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine.  It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.  And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave.  And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone.  And it gave his awards–Purple Heart, Bronze Star–showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death.  He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith.  And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American.”

Many American citizens, including Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, I spoke to were relieved to hear these public figures reject the use of one’s religion or background as a slur, but some were displeased with the timing of the repudiation with the election just two weeks away.

What do you think?  Should there have been repudiation from the start?  If so, why?  If not, why not?