Thomas Sutcliffe, writing in The Independent, notes — correctly, I believe — that:
When ITV scheduled I Was There, a review of the year which sidestepped the traditional suppliers of news coverage in favour of “citizen journalists”, they can't have known that the year's end would bring the most macabre example yet of this growing trend – the mobile phone footage of Saddam Hussein's final drop.
Setting ethics and human nicety aside for the moment this was surely the biggest scoop yet for “user-generated content” – as amateur news footage is also sometimes known.
Here was a major global news story, to which the more conventional news gathering operations had no access. And here was a person uninhibited enough to pull out a mobile and record the critical moment.
The result was a piece of footage that bypassed all the usual liberal anxieties about corporate agenda setting and editorial gatekeepers.
I don’t believe these acts of “citizen journalism” will replace or supplant traditional forms of newsgathering and reporting. I think Sutcliffe agrees with me although he does so for different reasons: “The problem with citizen journalists – just like all us citizens – is that they're incorrigible sensationalists.”