Digital media needs traditional broadcasting

There have been many images from the G20 protests broadcast in the news. The first, of protestors smashing up a branch of RBS, was a misnomer - three protestors out of 40,000 that chose violence as a form of protest. But look in the background of the picture. Most of the people visible have the large, unwieldy cameras characteristic of the national press. The broadsheets and news channels were desperate for an image of the ‘Summer of Violence’ emerging. What we got was a hollow, empty representation of the day – and we all knew it.

What followed over the next few days was altogether more interesting. Videos and photographs taken by protestors were being distributed on YouTube, blogs, and protest websites. At first there was little to suggest anything sinister at the Climate Camp protest, which mainly showed police moving people around using their riot shields. In some instances, you can clearly see that members of the police are ill at ease with the cameras that are being pointed at them, under scrutiny from a hundred silver boxes with little screens on the back of them. ‘You’d love to catch us doing something wrong on that, wouldn’t you?’ says one. As more dramatic footage emerged, including that of Ian Tomlinson and Nicola Fisher being unmistakably mistreated by members of the police force, it was hard not to be taken aback by the way that members of the public were using digital technology to tell their version of the truth. In some shots you can see nearly everyone at the front of a police line is holding a digital camera.

These images were a hundred times more compelling than those captured by traditional media giants, who stuck resolutely to repeating the images of three drunk teenagers smashing up a bank branch for the first few days of reporting. But they would not have surfaced with such force without the mainstream media. Public broadcasters and traditional broadsheets had a significant hand in shaping the public perception of the police handling of the G20 protests. News channels were slicing and dicing handheld footage, broadsheets were giving credibility and weight to individual accounts, Max Clifford is representing Nicola Fisher. It doesn’t get any more traditional media than that.

There are two things to take away from this. First, we have realised that we can surveil as well as be surveilled. Would we still be waiting for a full enquiry into the Hillsborough disaster if the fans involved had been carrying digital cameras and camera phones? Probably not. Secondly, regardless of the new power discovered through digital media, the public are still only the cameramen, not the directors of the saga.

Read more here

• Have we had too much of a good thing?
• Social media backlash against Nicola Fisher
• Police change their tune on G20 CCTV coverage