Today brought new and terrible news of Gaddafi regime forces targeting journalists covering the ongoing conflict in Libya. A BBC Arabic news team was taken from their van this past week on trying to reach Zawiya, were beaten and subject to mock executions and held for 21 hours, before being released and flown out of Libya. Currently, a Guardian writer who has received high honors in his profession and is a veteran of Somalia, Iraq, Afganistan and Sudan is missing in the western half of the country.These are just two of many cases.
If Gaddafi is targeting journalists so as to further decrease international attention on Libya and in so doing relatively quietly crush the rest of the opposition, sadly he may be succeeding. Already Libya, despite the gripping scenes of civil war, is sliding further down the sites of major western papers. Anderson Cooper did not rush into Zawiya the way he did Cairo, and there is good reason for that. The thugs sent out by Gaddafi seem to have even less concern for rules of conflict than those sent out into Cairo by Mubarak. Of course there were many high and low profile instances of reporters being harmed in Cairo, but that was a protest/conflict in which journalists could predict with more certainty from where it might be safe to report. Great reporters will continue to do great work in Libya under threat of grave harm, but the overall depth and amount of reports will have to take a hit.
This leads me to the question of intermedia influence. More specifically, the influence of social media on traditional media broadcast, something I’ve been thinking about recently. Following Andy Carvin and Mona Eltahawy on Twitter has been interesting, as they’ve been curating tweets on the subject of Libya, along with myriad other issues. They’re following a model I think some mass media outlets will follow soon: monitoring the blogosphere, social media and other unofficial outlets of news for information on parts of the conflict it is becoming impractical to cover otherwise.
This curating of new media reporting has its advantages, besides the obvious one of requiring fewer of an organization’s people on the ground in Libya. Citizen reporting is an unmediated way of letting a people express their experience to the world for themselves. Now for all the disadvantages of this model: inaccuracy, more bias, and generally not the journalistic standards that come with trained reporters. In the case of Libya, where just 5% of the population has regular access to the internet you’ll just get less reporting (and more you’ll need to translate) or you’ll end up quoting outside observers who have an interest in proceedings but no special knowledge you don’t have.
Agree that the mass media is starting to fulfill this curator role on stories such as this? Surely this is for other reasons than just reporter safety, but what do you think of this as a more permanent model?
middleeastaidan 
Interesting post..