Most of us take for granted the TV broadcasts which bring us titillating news coverage of various global conflicts. After all, we as the audience in the West are far removed from the conflict zones and simply wish to observe the macabre events unfolding on our Television sets. However, in the recent conflicts in the Middle East and beyond, radical new upstarts such as Al-Jazeera are re-shaping the very nature of the role of news broadcasters and the manner in which the news is collected and disseminated.
Modern conflict zone reporting was probably born during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, when the regime of Saddam Hussein allowed the then upstart Cable News Network (CNN) to station a skeleton crew of personnel in Baghdad and provide broadcast updates [1]. This cinematic real-time delivery of war hooked audiences forever after. From Somalia and Bosnia, through the next Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, live coverage became more pervasive. The upstart of this era; however, is adding an entirely new flavor to real-time coverage.
The best news broadcasters today use a wide array of media tools, and Al-Jazeera has used this to great effect, most notably in the sequence of events which saw the overthrew of the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. Al-Jazeera initially set up a live webfeed from the rooftop of a building overseeing Tahrir Square which was the main locus for the protest movement, until that was shut down. This was followed by the Egyptian government severing Al-Jazeera’s ability to provide local transmission to the Nilesat satellite, subsequently followed by a termination of Nilesat’s downlink of Al-Jazeera’s Arabic channel being transmitted into Egypt from elsewhere in the Middle East! While Al-Jazeera was battling with the Egyptian government over news coverage freedom, the protesters themselves used Twitter and Facebook to great avail in crowdsourcing the “task” of initiating momentum for the freedom revolution, and disseminating information on coordination and organization of movement. In all the furor, the Egyptian government didn’t seem to understand that retaining control over state owned TV could not possibly stop the movement [2]. The regime, thankfully, failed to realize that standard TV broadcasting is 1.0 in the fast-paced 2.0 world of converged social media, user-contributed media, and the ability those mediums have to rapidly alert news broadcasters of sources of news coverage. My personal take is that video broadcasting is here to stay, and will become even more powerful as technology advances, but it’s clearly not the sole arbiter of information delivery to viewers. In an interconnected World viewers can rely upon any other variety of mechanisms to disseminate and interact upon information, and in turn influence the standard video broadcast itself. This article quotes Al-Jazeera’s Online Producer who states that the popular “Web Desk” is used by commentators to talk on air about what is going on live on Al-Jazeera’s online portal [3].
Video clip showing an example of Al-Jazeera commentator
"checking in" with Web Desk
"checking in" with Web Desk
No comments:
Post a Comment