Citizen Journalism & Tear Gas at the G20

I first heard about the the incidents two days after they started. William Herring,  tweeted me a link to the first of four videos I would see. Each gave the impression that police were using overwhelming force against an apparently small and nonviolent group of protesters in a park  near the University of Pittsburgh.

After I retweeted that, I would discover the protests were against the G20 assembly of top level leaders the world's 20 largest industrial and developing nations, a gathering that I overwhelmingly support, in the US city that has made the best comeback over the past half century.

Video such as this one disturbed me. It was sandwiched between slabs of street-protest rhetoric and was clearly edited. Yet it displayed pretty good evidence that police had been more than a little zealous in their disbursement tactics. It was also the first indication that police had been "federalized." Why had that not been reported in traditional media. When had they been federalized and what was the reason?

As a tweeter-blogger, I didn't know; nor did I feel free to call the US attorney general's office and say I was a blogging citizen journalist whose readers wanted answers.

So I stayed with the videos and I found them ugly. When I tweeted that there had not been anything like this in the US since the 1960, I was almost immediately corrected. The G20 meeting in Seattle in 1999 had caused havoc on the streets where avowed anarchists clashed with police, causing personal injury, property damage, and disruption to that city for almost a full week. Not much got accomplished inside the World Trade Organization summit of financial ministers.

At about that point, Perry Caldwell, a new Tweeter sent me a clip from KDKA, Pittsburgh's Channel 2 news site reporting many windows being broken and other minor damage. He condemned violence on both sides, but seemed to me to think police had acted properly.

I felt the KDKA story was  one-sided and did not explain the massive police action involving  tear gas, smoke grenade and new ultrasonic "sound cannons" that evoke a head-splitting noise that seemed suited for an Orwellian novel.

I have my own one-sided view as well. I was a protester against war and for civil rights in the 60s. I tasted tear gas and came very close to feel a policeman's club on my head. My attitudes have changed, but I'm generally skeptical of unlawful assembly charges because they fly in the face of American rights to assembly.

Then Ed Shah jumped in. Ed and I frequently talk in Twitterville. He impresses me as passionate as I am about human rights and police states. Ed pointed out that the US had an obligation to protect world leaders when the are assembled on American soil. He also speculated that the street noise could be a distraction for a more dangerous act of terrorism against the G20 and of course he is right.

1. I quieted down and stepped back. There were lots of issues intertwining here. I really didn't know much about what was going on. Nor did I know much about the events building up to the confrontation on the streets.

I realized that I am not a news organization. The people with whom I connect to "report" on an issue are not a news network. We were stepping in to fill a void created by a media industry in atrophy but we really still lack the organization, leadership, legs and budget that the old dynasties had provided.

Had I been an editor, with budget and staff and Pittsburgh or the G20 had been part of our beat, here are a few things I would have done:

• I would have assigned and coordinated a handful of reporters, correspondents and stringers. I would have assigned one to interview the police chief, mayor, Pitt officials to get their side of the story. I would have a political correspondent speak with officials at Justice, State and maybe FBI. I would have that reporter write about the government thinking and decisions as well as what they knew that helped them reach the decisions.

• I would have assigned anther reporter to attach her or himself to the protesters, writing human interest pieces about them, where they were from, how they got to Pittsburgh and why as well as what they hoped to accomplish. I would have insisted the leaders be interviewed and their backgrounds checked out. I would have investigated where their money had come from.
• I would have had someone research both the protest movement against globalization as well as a brief history of US street protests and what they did or did not achieve.
• I would have had my art department draw maps showing the proximity or distance between protesters and the G20 Summit. I would have investigated the possible vulnerabilities caused by the protests.
• I would have spoken to local citizens and non participating eyewitnesses who could shed light on what they had seen.

And so on. But I am in no position to do any of those things. Unfortunately, it appears that neither is the press whose coverage of this protest has been thin at best and apparently written without having been there or seen anything firsthand.

This why I have become a proponent of what I call braided journalism, the coming together of tweeters like me with professional organizations like the New York Times. We have seen samples of this in the last 18 months; the Szechuan Earthquake, Mumbai, Gaza, Iran Elections, Station Fire and many other incidents.

When citizen and traditional journalism braid together the pubic is better served. We come closer to getting the whole story. The information provided tends to be more balanced. Our right to know allows us to form opinions on sufficient information.

G20 is now over. All parties will go home and share their thoughts with friends. Maybe some reflective commentary will appear online. But overall most people won't know what happened there because of a failure of braiding the information together and reporting on it.