MEDIA WATCH
Ira Basen
The new journalism and the G20
Last Updated: Wednesday, July 7, 2010 | 7:04 AM ET
By Ira Basen, Special to CBC News
Like many journalists, I have a bulletin board in my office on which I have pinned dozens of media passes accumulated over years of working for CBC Radio. I have accreditation for political meetings, sporting events, concerts, conferences, even a press pass for the West Edmonton Mall.
One of my prize possessions is my media pass for Canadian Country Music Week from the early 1980s.
It was the first story I ever covered and, even though I was just a freelancer, it was pretty exciting to see my name and CBC Radio on the same piece of paper.
I was "the press." I felt as if I had joined a pretty exclusive club.
Back then, it was a pretty exclusive club. If you were writing stories or taking pictures for a newspaper or magazine, or shooting video for a TV station or collecting audio for a radio station, you could call yourself a journalist.
Upload anyone? A man on rollerblades stops to photograph a barricade of riot police during the G20 demonstrations in Toronto in June 2010. (Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press) Other people could do all those things, of course, but you couldn't really call them journalists because there was no way for their stories or pictures to reach an audience that extended beyond their friends and family.
For the longest time, only a small handful of media companies in Canada had the capacity to distribute content to local or national audiences.
Front of the line
Membership in that club had its privileges.
If I was covering a war, people were less likely to shoot at me if they knew I was a journalist. If I was captured while covering that war, the Geneva Convention stipulated that I be treated as a prisoner of war, not as a spy.
If I got into trouble with the law, my company would defend me, and judges might consider my transgressions differently if they felt that freedom of the press was at stake.
At conventions and conferences, organizers would make sure I had all the technical facilities I needed to do my job.
Most of the time, they would even feed me and my press pass would open doors and allow me access to people that non-club members simply couldn't get.
'Corporate media'
Over the past few years, that journalistic club has become much less exclusive.
Anyone with an internet connection can now find a worldwide audience instantly and that has muddied the waters considerably when it comes to defining what journalism is, and who does it.
The consequences of that change were played out most recently on the streets of Toronto during the G20 summit.
What was striking about the violent protests that accompanied the summit was how little media accreditation seemed to matter to the Toronto police. Journalists for the National Post, the Globe and Mail and CTV were all detained at some point during the weekend.
Ironically, in the days before the summit, the mainstream media's greatest security concern centred around the protesters, not the police. The Toronto Star warned its reporters to "hide press credentials until you need them. Protesters often don't like the 'corporate media.'"
Indeed, TV trucks from both the CBC and CTV were attacked by protesters, in what were surely not random acts of violence.
Citizen journalists
Today, in the aftermath of the G20 confrontations, much of the anger currently directed at the Toronto police revolves around its treatment of people who, until recently, would never have been considered to be members of the media club: bloggers, the so-called citizen journalists and people reporting for "independent media" sites.
Dozens of those individuals claim to have been roughed up, abused, arrested or detained under very difficult circumstances.
Most of them did not have official summit accreditation, and their pleas to police officers that "I'm a journalist" generally fell on deaf ears. Indeed, some of them have argued that they were singled out for special mistreatment because they declared themselves to be journalists.
Police deny this, but what happened on the streets of Toronto that weekend might mark a turning point in the way that journalists of every stripe can expect to be treated in an age when the tools of media production now belong to everyone.
Everyone's a journalist
Perhaps the best way of understanding police behaviour at this juncture is to recognize that almost everyone in that crowd had some sort of camera-equipped mobile device, which meant that, in the minds of the police, almost everyone was a potential journalist.
That meant they could either give special treatment to everyone or to no one. They chose no one.
On some levels, it is hard to blame them. Navigating today's journalistic landscape without a program is difficult at the best of times.
In 2004, political bloggers were invited to the Democratic and Republican national conventions for the first time, in recognition of the fact that some of them have more readers and carry more weight than their mainstream colleagues.
Today, a recent American survey revealed that 52 per cent of bloggers view themselves as journalists, up from just 33 per cent in 2009.
But many members of the old journalistic club aren't quite ready to throw the doors wide open.
If you are a correspondent for a mainstream media outlet like the CBC, you are expected to adhere to some basic journalistic principles such as verification, balance and fairness, as well as show some allegiance, however flawed, to the holy grail of objectivity.
But some mainstream organizations have chosen to extend their "brands" into the world of what's called citizen journalism.
The CBC did that during the G20 weekend, assembling a pre-selected team of residents, business owners and local bloggers inside the cordoned-off areas of the city to contribute their observations to a blog, alongside certain CBC reporters.
But some organizations are much freer. At CNN iReport, for example you don't have to worry about pre-moderation or anything else.
Their citizen reporters post their stories directly to the web with no editorial input. Are these contributors journalists? Or are they simply emulating what journalists do?
Comment is free
Take the case of 26-year-old Jesse Rosenfeld, who was roughed up and detained by Toronto police during a demonstration on the first day of the summit.
According to at least one eyewitness, in this case TVO host Steve Paikin, the police action was unprovoked and unjustified.
Rosenfeld has been widely identified in the press as someone who writes for the British paper The Guardian, one of the world's most respected newspapers.
But, in fact, he doesn't actually write for The Guardian, which has some of the strictest editorial standards anywhere. He blogs for a Guardian site called Comment is Free, where just about anyone can say just about anything they want.
Rosenfeld, who was refused media accreditation to the summit, has speculated that he might have been singled out by Toronto police because, in an earlier blog post, he accused them and the RCMP of "systemic racism."
He doesn't offer any real proof for that charge, but on Comment is Free, unlike The Guardian, he didn't have to.
The explosion of social media over the past few years has changed the face of journalism. And almost all of those changes have been positive.
The democratization of media, the ability of people who were previously denied a voice in the mainstream to now have their voices heard is undeniably a cause for celebration.
But the actions of the Toronto police during the G20 summit have exposed what is perhaps an unintended consequence of this new media reality: When everyone is a journalist, no one is a journalist.
And the significance of that shift should not be under-estimated.
