Saddam Hanging Video Is Everywhere; Underlines Power of Amateur Footage

The biggest story in the world today comes thanks to an amateur video. I’m referring, of course, to the footage taken by mobile phone of Saddam Hussein’s execution in Baghdad. What’s on the video is chilling stuff, even if it’s impossible to forget for a second that Saddam was a convicted mass murderer. Available on countless websites, the amateur video documents what the NYT characterizes as “a barrage of mockery and derision from unseen tormentors below the gallows.” While less graphic than the 2002 Daniel Pearl murder video, the video documents anything but the sober, unencumbered justice suggested by the government-released-and-edited footage of the hanging. The Times, which earlier this week led with a piece about how U.S. officials tried to slow down the execution, today leads with a report on how the Iraqi government has opened an investigation into the “abusive” behavior directed at the former dictator in his final moments. As the Seattle Times noted in a roundup, Britain’s deputy prime minister called the leaked images “unacceptable” and the Vatican “decried the footage as a ‘spectacle’ violating human rights.” At press time, The Times of London reported that a guard had been arrested for filming the video.

As with the 1991 Rodney King beating in Los Angeles, the circumstance of Saddam’s last minutes have become world news in large part because amateur documentation of the event has been distributed so widely. As Jessica Vascellaro writes in today’s WSJ, this is “the latest reminder that the device that tens of millions of people are now carrying around in their pockets is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful news-gathering tools on Earth.” Of the execution footage, she writes, “cellphone videos can be powerful without being high-quality. The Saddam Hussein video provoked outrage throughout the world by showing the taunts shouted at the deposed dictator just before his death, which were absent from the official video released earlier. It did this even though it was grainy, poorly lit and jerked around.”

Vascellaro’s piece, which is a must-read for anyone who wants to know how the act of newsgathering has changed irrevocably, walks the reader through the tools needed to manage mobile-phone videos, shows how even professional news organizations are using “amateur” tools, and delineates how a mixture of professional and community journalism can add up to truly all-encompassing reporting. As CNN.com’s Mitch Gelman told her, “Even the best journalists are only able to cover a story from the outside looking in. Citizen participants see a story from the inside looking out.”

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