Last night I was flicking around the outer reaches of Sky, and came upon CCTV just as the top of the hour was approaching. So I decided to see how the awful Chinese earthquake was being reported in south western China on the English language version of the Chinese state TV service.
Well of course it was the main story, but what was really interesting were the pictures, or lack of them. Unlike the BBC or Sky, who seemed to have a reasonable quantity of imagery of collapsed buildings as well as stills of people being pulled from the rubble, CCTV mainly had images from other cities that had felt the force, but where buildings hadn’t fallen, and where the worst damage was limited to cracks in those buildings’ infrastructure.
Certainly they had people from the Chinese seismelogical organisations explaining the quake, and an interview with the Chinese premier explaining how help would be on its way. But little in the way of “action” footage.
It can’t really be embarrassing for the Chinese government to admit that a major earthquake can cause large amounts of damage can it?
Meanwhile over on the BBC’s dot.life blog, Rory Cellan-Jones blogged about Robert Scoble being one of the first to share reports about the earthquake, as he used Twitter to pass on links and other people’s “twits” to his gargantuan following on that service.
The tenet of the piece is that Twitter is becoming a news source. But I’m not sure I agree with this. As I said, when the UK had our insiginificant little earthquake a couple of months ago at 1am in the morning, I Twittered it, and read other people’s Twitters prior to Five Live, Sky News and BBC News 24 beginning to report it. But does that really mean that Twitter’s a news source? I’m not so sure. I still want verified information.
Twitter can be a way to pass on news stories, but it’s limited to where the technology is available, and the use to which it’s made locally. For example, I suspect that if something big happened in Brazil, it’d be Orkut I’d look towards. But as ringsting-iom wrote in his comment on the BBC blog, the mobile networks went down very quickly, so getting Twitters out isn’t easy.
And I don’t recall a similar Twitter explosion following the cyclone that hit Burma where of course the military junta keep everyone under very close scrutiny (and are now causing the unnecessary deaths of thousands of its citizens by being very suspicious about all the aid being offered to them).
First hand citizen journalism will continue to play an important role in what gets reported, but it’s not the same as a properly resourced news organisation with the facilities to check and double check what’s happening – not what I think might be happening.