Old and New Media: Converging During the Pakistan Emergency (March 2007-February 2008)

5. Citizen Journalism: Redefining Media and Power

December 27, 2007: Benazir Bhutto assassinated

In the developed world, a single event often triggers the widespread realization that citizen journalism has forever changed a nation’s media landscape. For example, within six hours of bombs exploding on London subway trains and a bus on July 7, 2005, the BBC received over 1,000 photographs, 20 amateur videos, 4,000 text messages, and 20,000 emails. This influx of citizen reporting prompted Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC’s World Service and Global News Division, to write: "We know now that when major events occur, the public can offer us as much new information as we are able to broadcast to them. From now on, news coverage is a partnership."[47] In Pakistan, the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto on December 27, 2007, redefined Pakistani news media as a hybrid product generated by professional and amateur reporters and disseminated via old and new media sources.

Bhutto’s death shocked and enraged Pakistanis as well as the international community, heightening the sense of political instability across the country. By the time of Bhutto’s death, Musharraf had lifted his ban on news channels and the incident received 24-hour news coverage for several days. The assassination was also extensively covered by the international press and broadcast media. In fact, Pakistani FM radio stations, which are legally prevented from broadcasting news, also spread word about Bhutto’s death and its fallout with impunity. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most Pakistanis were glued to their television screens for information about Bhutto’s last moments and the perpetrators of the attack. And yet the assassination marked a turning point in Pakistan’s media landscape and ushered in a new era of citizen journalism.

We have seen how new media platforms were harnessed after the imposition of emergency rule for information dissemination and community organizing. By the end of 2007, young Pakistanis and activists of all ages were increasingly turning to SMS text messaging, Flickr, and YouTube to help coordinate and document protests, provide original news coverage of hyperlocal events (such as rallies on the LUMS campus), and offer alternative media distribution models to offset government censorship. Such mediated civic engagement was limited to activist communities and those at home and abroad with ready access to the internet. In the wake of Bhutto’s assassination, however, the circulation of an amateur video and images by one blogger catapulted citizen journalism to the center of the Pakistani media landscape and earned the work of nonprofessional reporters unprecedented credibility. The following case study illustrates how media coverage of the investigation into Bhutto’s assassination transformed the course of citizen journalism in Pakistan.

Soon after Bhutto’s death had been verified, its cause was contested. Eyewitnesses in Rawalpindi reported hearing gunshots before an explosion. Members of Bhutto’s entourage and her colleagues in the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) claimed that the leader had been shot. In the immediate wake of the attack, a team of doctors examined her body and stated in a report that she had an open wound on her left temporal region. A day after the assassination, government officials claimed that Bhutto had died when her head hit the lever of the sunroof of her car as she ducked to avoid an assassin’s bullets and/or in response to the sound of a blast caused by a suicide bomber. The question of whether Bhutto died of gunshot wounds or a head injury riveted the nation because the truth would have implications on allegations about lax security and government complicity in the assassination.

An important piece of evidence to help settle this debate came in the form of images and an amateur video generated by a PPP supporter at the rally where Bhutto was killed and subsequently circulated by a popular Karachi-based blogger. By making the footage and images available to the mainstream media and public at large, these citizen journalists sparked an accountability movement that eventually forced the Pakistani government to revisit its account of Bhutto’s death.

5.1. The Teeth Maestro Blog: From Online Diary to Citizen Journalism

The blogger who initially circulated the key images and video clip is Dr. Awab Alvi, a dentist by day who runs a blog called Teeth Maestro. Alvi also contributes and cross-posts to Metroblogging Karachi, an English-language blog maintained by a community of Karachi-based bloggers. Alvi came to blogging early, launching Teeth Maestro in 2004 and signing up as part of the Metroblogging Karachi team in April 2005, soon after the launch of the group blog. Alvi is aware of the trajectory of his blogging career: "It started with me keeping an online diary. Then it became a serious hobby."[48] Since playing a significant role in the coverage of Bhutto’s death, Alvi describes himself as a citizen journalist. His posts are regularly featured by Global Voices Online, an international blog aggregator.[49]

Before the imposition of emergency, Alvi’s contributions to Metroblogging Karachi were quirky observations that fit with the blog’s mandate of celebrating Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi.[50] He posted musings about flawed urban infrastructure, calls for the eradication of poverty and crime, links to news reports about the city, announcements and reviews of cultural events, critiques of advertising campaigns and rants against traffic jams. Umar Siddiqui, who manages the Metroblogging Karachi team, says that Alvi’s popularity helped the blog generate traffic: 3,000 unique visitors and 40,000 page views each day, significant statistics in the Pakistani context, where the digital divide curtails the popularity of local websites.

Interestingly, Alvi did not primarily consider blogging as a means to community organizing and political advocacy. For example, when Bhutto was first targeted by a suicide bomb attack that killed 134 people in Karachi on October 18, 2007, Alvi chose not to acknowledge the violence in his posts. "When all these bad incidents were happening," he says, "I thought we should cover Karachi in a positive light and so I went to Flickr and picked up all these inspirational pictures and for several days I just kept a photo blog. I wanted to Karachi to remember its beauty and how it is really a good place."

During the emergency, however, Teeth Maestro--motivated much like The Emergency Times by the media vacuum created by Musharraf--emerged as a go-to blog for information about the students’ activist movement. Alvi also proved to be one of the most technologically forward bloggers in Pakistan. He was the first to introduce the SMS2Blog feature for live updates and helped others covering anti-emergency protests install the technology as well. At the time of Bhutto’s assassination, Alvi was arguably the most prominent Pakistani blogger and his interests had clearly shifted from cultural observations to political commentary, advocacy, and community organizing. This is evidenced by the fact that on the day of Bhutto’s death, he posted four blogs on Teeth Maestro, including live updates via SMS. The next day, he posted 12 times: his own updates from the streets of Karachi and links to important news items and insightful commentary from the global print media were supplemented by contributions from other bloggers and citizen journalists. For example, he posted an eyewitness report of the violent response across Karachi to Bhutto’s death that he received via email.[51]

5.2. Hybridity: Citizen Journalists Inform Mainstream Media Coverage

Two days after the assassination, someone contacted Alvi claiming to have obtained images and a video clip that confirmed that Bhutto was shot by an assassin, and therefore did not succumb to a head wound as government officials were suggesting. These images and video footage had been posted by a PPP supporter to his home page on the social networking site Orkut. However, after being inundated with questions and comments about the new evidence, the original source removed the images and clip from Orkut. Luckily, Alvi’s contact was able to grab screen shots of those uploaded images before they were taken down.

Alvi then contacted the original source, the PPP supporter, and convinced him to share the images and video. Soon after, Alvi had obtained four images indicating that Bhutto had indeed been shot. However, the video clip proved harder to obtain. The PPP supporter was based in Islamabad and only had access to a dial-up internet connection. Since the video was a 56MB file, he was having trouble uploading and electronically forwarding it to Alvi. At that point, Alvi contacted two employees at Dawn News, an independent, English-language Pakistani news channel, and arranged from them to collect the video from the PPP supporter’s house the next morning. The goal, after all, was to make the images and video clip available to the public as soon as possible, whether via the Teeth Maestro blog or a mainstream media broadcast. After a late-night phone call with Alvi, the PPP supporter agreed to share the video clip with the Dawn News team. But the next morning, the original source could not be reached on his cellphone, and the handoff of the video clip did not occur.

In the meantime, by the end of the day on December 29, Alvi had posted the four images he received from the PPP supporter to his blog.[52] Teeth Maestro was thus the first media outlet to circulate images of Bhutto’s assassination that could help clarify whether she died of gunshot wounds or a fatal head injury. "The moment I saw these images, I knew I had to get them out publicly as soon as possible," says Alvi. "I quickly edited the posts, published them online on my blog and circulated the link far and wide, letting the dynamics of the free and open internet protect me and the [original]

The images were soon cross-posted on other Pakistani blogs, such as The Emergency Times.[53] Alvi also contacted CNN iReport with his story about fresh evidence and forwarded the images to the Dawn News channel. But these mainstream media outlets were slow to pick up on the story. Dawn News first broadcast the images in the context of an interview with a security analyst at 3 p.m. on December 30. Meanwhile, CNN iReport did not contact Alvi until the next day.

On December 31, the UK-based public service Channel 4 first broadcast the video clip of Bhutto’s assassination that Alvi was not able to obtain from the PPP supporter.[54] This video was then endlessly circulated within the Pakistani blogosphere and on YouTube.[55] Interestingly, Channel 4’s analysis of the video clip borrows heavily from the annotation on the pictures uploaded by Alvi. The similarity indicates that the citizen journalists’ interpretation of Bhutto’s assassination set the tone for international mainstream media coverage of the ‘cause of death’ controversy.

The wide circulation and analysis by the global mainstream media of this video and the four images that accompanied it eventually caused the Pakistani government to retract their statement about Bhutto succumbing to a head injury. According to the BBC, this amateur video and the related images proved that security provided for Bhutto by the Pakistani government was indeed lax.[56]

It remains unclear how Channel 4 obtained the video clip that eluded Alvi and reporters for various independent Pakistani news channels. Alvi explains that the PPP supporter--who may have been part of Bhutto’s security team on the day of the assassination--first showed his video footage and images to other members of the PPP. Apparently, at the time of this initial screening, he saved the video clip to the hard drive of a computer in a PPP office in Islamabad. PPP officials then instructed the supporter not to share this evidence with the media. However, sensing the importance of the evidence, the supporter returned home and uploaded his images to Orkut, thereby drawing Alvi’s attention. The original source for the video footage and images has not been heard from since he spoke with Alvi on the night of December 29. For that reason, Alvi believes that a PPP official who knew that the video was available on a PPP office computer sold the footage to Channel 4 for a hefty sum. This, however, remains unconfirmed.

Alvi’s involvement in the circulation of such key evidence regarding Bhutto’s assassination helped revolutionize the role played by citizen journalists in Pakistan. Soon after Bhutto’s death, the Dawn Group of Newspapers, Pakistan’s leading news and media entity, launched a ‘citizen journalism unit’.[57] A section on their website encourages contributions by nonprofessional reporters to be showcased on the Dawn News television channel and on the group’s website. This opening up to collaboration by the most traditional, and therefore respected, news outlet in Pakistan underscores how much citizen journalism and the credibility of information available on new media platforms matured between the imposition of emergency rule on November 3 and Bhutto’s death on December 27.

5.3. New Media Platforms as Online Memorials

Teeth Maestro was by no means the only online venue where this seminal political event was documented. Innumerable Pakistani blogs followed updates on the assassination investigation, linked to condolence messages put out by world leaders and prominent Pakistanis, and kept track of the debate on whether to go ahead with parliamentary elections initially scheduled for January 2008.

More importantly, bloggers availed of this opportunity to document first-person encounters with Bhutto. For example, on the popular All Things Pakistan blog, Dr. Adil Najam recalled his encounters with Bhutto on several occasions and remarked on the candor of their exchanges.[58] Such posts together comprise a wonderful online archive of Bhutto’s interactions with Pakistanis during her two terms as prime minister. They also help paint a more nuanced portrait of a woman who had become more iconic than real in the months before her death.

New media platforms were also embraced by young Pakistanis looking to express and archive their grief at the news of Bhutto’s passing. Hours after her death, YouTube was inundated with tributes to Bhutto that edited together images from her life to the soundtrack of spiritual music [59] or the national anthem.[60]

Online memorial websites such as Respectance.com also became spaces for national mourning featuring biographies and images of Bhutto, testimonies from Pakistanis across the diaspora, and memories of interactions with her.[61]

Flickr was also used as a memorial site, as users uploaded their favorite images of the former prime minister, tagged them with prayers and appreciative titles, or contextualized them with commentary on her legacy.[62] Other users uploaded images of flowers and gardens as gifts for the departed leader.[63]

The popular social networking site Facebook also became a venue for reactions to Bhutto’s death and the news of her son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s appointment as her successor. In the wake of Bhutto’s death, over 400 Facebook groups commemorating her or showing solidarity with her politics emerged on the site. Groups such as "RIP Benazir Bhutto", "Benazir Bhutto: We Will Never Forget", "I hate those who killed Benazir Bhutto", and "Bhutto: A Tribute" featured images of the leader, excerpts from interviews with her, praise for her, and lively discussion by group members about her legacy.

Soon after he was named as chairman of the PPP, bogus profiles of Bilawal appeared on Facebook. These were soon flooded with condolence messages from young Pakistanis concerned about Bilawal and his sisters. One profile also carried a response to the outpouring of grief, purportedly from Bilawal, claiming that he felt ill-prepared to enter politics and considered himself "merely a student." This message was republished by several US- and UK-based news organizations before Facebook found the profiles to be inauthentic and removed them from the site.[64] Widespread accusations that the fake profiles were created by politicians opposed to the PPP further suggests that members of the political establishment were well attuned to the use of new media platforms.

In addition to bogus profiles, Bilawal became the subject of over 80 Facebook groups--including "Bilawal Bhutto Zardari: Savior of Democracy in Pakistan" and "Bilawal Bhutto Zardari? Where’d he come from?"--within a week of his mother’s death. Many of these catered to female fans of Bhutto’s handsome successor.