Iraq war photos show power of citizens media

I’m quoted in a Baltimore Sun story by David Folkenflik on participatory media and the Iraq war: Amateurs have opened door to horrifying views of war. Disturbing images have news outlets grappling with how much to show. Excerpt:

J.D. Lasica, senior editor for the Online Journalism Review, says the U.S. military has lost the ability to control the coverage of damaging events during the violence-plagued occupation of Iraq. Pictures of the soldiers’ coffins, taken by a civilian contractor as an act of private protest, were ultimately published in the Seattle Times despite a ban by the Pentagon.

The photos of the coffins and the prison abuse “point up the power of ordinary citizens to take media into their own hands,” Lasica says via e-mail. “These amateur photographs have become the iconic images of this war.”

“This scandal could not have occurred four or five years ago, before citizens (including US troops) achieved the power to be visual reporters,” Lasica writes. “There’s no question that, but for the publication and airing of these photos, the reports of the prisoner abuse would have wound up buried on page A19.”

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.