The Mumbai Effect
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.