Use of Citizen Sources during the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks

Canberra.
The next speaker at ANZCA 2010 is Serene Tng, whose interest is in the influence of citizen journalism on journalistic reporting; her case study are the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Citizen reporting is increasingly important in such major news events; this is social media in action. Serene examined the coverage of the attacks across four major international newspapers, in order to examine how citizen reporting affects the traditional dominance of standard institutional sources.

The role of the media is fundamental in any terrorist acts: the media could be seen as promoting the terrorist cause by reporting acts of terror, but government sources tend to dominate in the reporting and framing of such events; especially in breaking news, however, government sources are often backgrounded in favour of voices from the scene, and this may affect how stories are framed at such times.

The Mumbai attack unfolded over 60 hours in November 2008; the attacks were significant in scale and audacity, and Twitter played an important part as on-the-ground intelligence. Serene examined news coverage over the four days of the event and the three days following it, looking at the use of citizen sources, the balance between such sources and others, the nature of such sources, the commonly used frames for them, and the differences across different newspapers.

Citizen sources were divided into victim or family (local or foreign), witness, vox pop (local or foreign), and citizen journalist (local or foreign), for a total of seven categories; other source categories included government, police, etc. She also examined the timing of source use (beginning, middle, or end of the events).

Citizens made up for 33% of sources in the 193 news stories covered in the study, and they were used mostly during the first two days of the crisis. After the first two days, government sources became more important. 85% of citizen sources gave private experiential accounts; government accounts were usually public and analytical.

Citizen sources were associated with the disaster frame (reporting on what happened to themselves or their friends). The Times of India showed the most citizen influence in the news agenda; 18% gave analytical accounts and 29% associated their accounts with political frames. This was markedly different for the New Zealand Herald, for example. The Times of India also strongly relied on government sources throughout, though (44%).

The findings show that there was a high value placed on citizens as eyewitnesses, and that journalists may not necessarily rely on government sources as crises unfold. But this does not translate into a strong influence on the news agenda; citizens were mainly placed as victims and eyewitnesses, not as analysts of the situation. The use of citizen sources to break news was limited, verification remained a challenge, and journalists were using citizens more for strategic reasons. The different use in the Times of India was notable, and may be explained through the high level of political dissent in India; citizens provided a different voice.

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