[IMC-Video] Cell phone videos of war let Internet viewers hear the rockets, feel the terror

[a. mark liiv]

Cell phone videos of war let Internet viewers hear the rockets, feel the terror

Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, July 28, 2006

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/07/28/MNG2RK79S61.DTL

Julien created BloggingBeirut.com 18 months ago as a romantic pursuit 
-- a way to share the beauty of his native Lebanon with a woman he 
met in graduate school in New York. That relationship dissolved, but 
last week BloggingBeirut was getting 400,000 hits a day after Julien, 
who asked that his last name not be published, posted video shot on 
cell phones of his beloved hometown now ravaged by war.

In a town in northern Israel last week, 16-year-old Guy Naveh posted 
footage on the video-sharing site YouTube.com that he shot with a 
digital camera from the balcony of his family's apartment. He wanted 
friends in other parts of Israel and relatives in the United States 
to sense the panic people feel when an air raid siren blows. More 
than 9,000 people have seen Naveh's video, including a friend of his 
who wanted to shoot a video, too, Naveh wrote in an e-mail, "but his 
mother don't want him to go outside."

"When you watch a video you can almost feel what the camera man did," 
Naveh wrote. "And when you read a text ... well ... you need to use 
your imagination."

Video-sharing technology is revolutionizing how people far from the 
battlefield understand the latest Middle East war. Experts predict 
that the edgy, personalized clips being passed around worldwide soon 
will influence traditional broadcast news by infusing it with the 
passion of citizen journalists, who are reporting as rockets crash 
onto their neighborhoods.

 From popular video-sharing sites like YouTube to amateur blogs 
floating in the Internet ether, viewers are seeing footage shot by 
the shaky hand of someone living where the bombs are falling in 
Israel and Lebanon -- and they are feeling their fear. This type of 
street-level, first-person footage, or guerrilla filmmaking, has been 
seen less from citizens of Iraq or Afghanistan, experts said, because 
the technology infrastructure and power supply is inferior to that in 
the more prosperous Israel and Lebanon.

Among the examples of cinema verite on sharing sites are more slickly 
produced, politically partisan pieces. They're often a pastiche of 
widely distributed news photographs or video clips set over 
background music. Images of injured children are a staple.

But partisanship is not what Mohammad Soubra, a 27-year-old Lebanon 
native who grew up in the shadow of Israel's 1982 invasion, had in 
mind when he made his first posting to YouTube last week.

"I am not taking sides, left or right, in this war, I just want 
people to see what war does to people," said Soubra, who now lives in 
the Netherlands. He posted a 50-second video to YouTube last week, 
after soliciting submissions from friends back home, "so people can 
understand what a war is like."

Since then, more than 300,000 people have viewed the video Soubra's 
friend shot from the balcony of an east Beirut apartment. It consists 
of the sounds and accompanying flash of bombs exploding several miles 
away. Soubra remembered those sounds and sights from his childhood. 
His parents and brother still live in Lebanon.

"You don't have to just post a photo of a burned child to show the 
impact of war," Soubra said. "I want people to see another impact of 
war. How you can't sleep at night because bombs are going off 
outside. I wanted people to see this and debate it." Soubra is 
particularly aware of what he doesn't see on
TV.

"There is a (TV journalist) standing on a hill with an exploded 
building behind them far away. They are reporting without passion," 
he said. "They are not living there."

Last week, Jaron Gilinsky headed to Haifa to film a news feature for 
Current TV. The year-old San Francisco network is largely programmed 
on user-created video content that's geared to 18- to 34-year-olds. A 
year ago, Gilinsky began submitting videos as "a total stranger," 
said a network official, and has worked his way up to a regular 
correspondent.

As Gilinsky was interviewing the official of a rail depot where a 
rocket blast killed eight people days earlier there, another rocket 
landed just outside the depot.

Cameras still rolling, Gilinsky and depot employees hurried to a 
nearby bomb shelter. Just as they were sealing themselves inside, 
another rocket hit the depot. Nobody was hurt.

As the lights went back on inside the shelter, Gilinsky's eyes 
nervously darted around the room. He turned toward the camera and 
said, "I'm freaking out right now. This is crazy. Crazy. I'm 
sweating. I'm dripping with sweat."

He returned to the site of his bomb-shortened interview. "It landed 
exactly where we were filming a minute ago. A minute ago," Gilinsky 
said. "We were standing there a minute ago."

It was a moment of edgy on-air realism rarely seen on the major networks.

Current TV's young audience appreciates this unedited approach, said 
supervising producer Laura Ling. "They are exposed to so much reality 
TV that news doesn't seem real to them any more. We're just trying to 
peel back the layers.

"And with Jaron's story, we just kind of let it unfold," she said.

Former CNN correspondent and bureau chief Rebecca MacKinnon said, 
"Professional camera crews are rarely there when a bomb goes off or a 
rocket lands. They usually show up afterwards. And the reporters 
(from network news crews) are trained professionals. They're usually 
not from the towns they're covering. They're trying to cover the 
story objectively.

"But with these videos, the person is showing you what he is 
filming," said MacKinnon, now a co-founder of Global Voices Online. 
Run out of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and 
Society, the nonpartisan organization monitors thousands of 
international bloggers daily in the hope of bringing more local 
voices to the international media conversation.

"There's a genuineness to their voices," MacKinnon said. "When you 
see these videos, it makes you say, 'Oh, my God, what would it be 
like to be that person.' "

But MacKinnon doesn't foresee amateur videographers supplanting 
traditional journalists. Instead, she sees bloggers and other video 
posters leading journalists to untold stories in undiscovered -- at 
least by the media -- corners of the world. Efforts at trying to get 
more behind-the-lines footage out of Iraq have been hampered, she 
said, by the country's intermittent power supply and relatively poor 
technology infrastructure.

"So for that reason, I don't think we'll be seeing a lot of video 
coming out of Darfur, for example," MacKinnon said. "But this is 
citizens' media, and we're seeing it take another step into the media 
ecosystem from the fringe."

As for the credibility of video floating around the Internet, Global 
Vision offers this advice to journalists on its Web site, 
www.globalvoicesonline.org:

"Quote from any blog at your own risk, just as you quote from any 
source at your own risk. And as with any source, anonymous blogs must 
pass a much higher credibility threshold than blogs whose authors 
make their identity public and their allegiances clear."

Though he is Israeli, the allegiances of the 16-year-old YouTube 
poster Naveh may be less related to his nationality and more to the 
bravado typical of someone his age.

"My goal?" Naveh wrote in response to an e-mailed question. "Maybe 
just to show people how brave I am for going out recording during 
bombing."
How to find them

URLs for videos and videobloggers mentioned in this article:

Mohammad Soubra's video can be found at: 
www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=msoubra

Guy Naveh's video can be found at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-nEphWmM0M

Julien's blog can be found at: www.BloggingBeirut.com

Jaron Gilinsky's report from Haifa can be found by searching Current 
TV's site, www.current.tv/pods/news/PD03937

Global Voices Online is at www.globalvoicesonline.org

E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli at sfchronicle.com.

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