Citizen Journalism at PRWatch

PRWatch.org is starting to do some more collaborative journalism, such as this discovery of photoshopped propaganda found by a volunteer citizen journalist in Spain.

This pro-Liberation photo is of a US soldier holding an Iraqi child with the added caption of "She's glad he's there. Are you?" This citizen journalist finds another version of the same scene that has a caption that says that the girl is actually a boy, and that his mother had just killed by crossfire.

The creator of the photo says that she didn't know the back story of the photo -- which is exactly why it is propaganda. There is no way she could have known that this child is happy that this US soldier is in Iraq, but she wrote the caption anyway.

[NOTE: The citizen journalist doesn't link to a primary source document {of the photo caption (i.e. links to CowGirlFunk.com instead of Hayne Palmour/North County Times) UPDATED 2-7-04} so it's unclear if this is the real caption, whether it's really a boy or a girl or whether the soldier is in the marines or the navy. It is clear that the photo attributes happiness to the child without any evidence to back it up.]
[UPDATE 2-9-04: The PRWatch citizen journalist ElGringo does some more verification in the comments section below by tracking down the original caption at the North County Times as well as further confirmation of the photographer and situation: "Damir Sagolj of Reuters for his unforgettable picture of a burly American medic in Iraq cuddling a child whose mother had just been killed in a crossfire." I understand that time constraints may make this degree verification difficult in the context of a forum, but it is a necessary degree of verification.]

Sheldon Rampton, one of the editors of PRWatch, posed the following comment in response to the discovery of photoshopped propaganda:

You guys are incredible! I wish I had your research skills. This is an example of something I'd really like to expand at PR Watch -- the use of "distributed journalism" that empowers visitors to our site to do original investigative research and to publish it. Any thoughts on things we can be doing to help that happen?

I'm finishing up a long blog essay outlining my ideas for how to integrate an analytical framework developed by the Central Intelligence Agency that will allow for decentralized journalistic collaboration. I plan on posting it soon.

The other day, someone named Grant left a comment on my entry about the limitations of Wikipeida's NPOV Policy. He mentioned PRWatch in his comments, and how they are running on CivicSpace. I had actually been researching CivicSpace, and I am in the process of converting Echo Chamber Project over to this same platform.

I am assuming that this is the same Grant who just put the following plug for my documentary over at the PR Watch forums:

This project, in which a filmmaker is using distributed research methods to make a documentary on the media role in the war, looks promising. The project's "benevolent dictator" has broken everything out into logical chunks with specific goals and deadlines and recruits volunteers for very specific tasks. It doesn't appear like he has a herd of people rushing to volunteer yet, but I like the concept.

I'm still converting to CivicSpace which will provide the social networking software that it'll make it possible to put the volunteers I have recruited to work. As well as recruit more volunteers. It is too logistically difficult and time consuming for me to individually assign tasks in a top-down hierachical manner -- It'll be much better when I am able to just post my needs in a blog posting and then have the ecosystem of citizen journalists work out the details and get stuff done.

Converting over to CivicSpace also means that a lot of my URLs are going to be changing. I'll be able to promote the project a lot more as soon as all of the URLs are locked in.

Grant mentions this project again in his response:

Education: One of the things I like about the Echo Chamber project mentioned above is that it affords an opportunity to learn as the information is gathered - about both the media and the process of researching and producing a documentary. It would be nice if basic information about PR practices and misinformation techniques could be referenced as the research progresses, helping improve the volunteers' research skills as well as their understanding of the media.

I do hope that this project can help train a wave of citizen journalists -- and learn about independent documentary production at the same time. I am hoping that I will be able to create a self-sustaining learning community where academic advisors and volunteers can help teach each other about the psychological aspects of persuasion techniques as well as their understanding of the media.