In the Bellingcat documentary, I was particularly struck by Professor Jay Rosen’s distinction between how credibility is established between traditional journalism and open source investigative journalism. He says that while traditional journalism can rely on the credibility established by the institutions that platform it, open source journalism has no choice but to rely on transparency. Thus, the resources used to generate journalistic accounts of events such as war crimes need to be made available and need to be directly verifiable by the public. In addition to making these sources accessible, open source journalists also guide the public through the process of analyzing the data and verifying its authenticity. This got me thinking about how traditional journalism could benefit from adopting a similar approach based on transparency and reproducibility, as academia has. This could avoid problems like the controversy we briefly discussed in class about Judith Miller’s dismissal from The New York Times.

I was also surprised to see how fabricated data could be picked up by international media without any effort to verify it. These examples clearly demonstrate that the media has its flaws and that its biases can affect the quality of the reporting it does. At a time when trust in the media is on the decline, what would it mean for traditional journalism to include sources in its reporting that help the public verify the claims being made rather than just expecting its readers to trust it? Does journalism lose something when transparency becomes a much more important part of its work than trust? In asking these questions, I could not help but think of cases where otherwise perfectly credible sources demand anonymity. What does transparency mean when confidentiality is such an important part of journalists’ work?

I was fascinated by the creativity of investigative journalists and how they use gaming and geolocation technologies to challenge official government statements. This kind of work by ordinary citizens is inspiring and illustrates an optimistic application of technology to democratize access to crucial information. The documentary complements the Times and Forbes article very well. On the one hand, “social media, smartphones and near real-time monitoring of attacks could usher in a new era of accountability”. On the other, it is legitimate to be wary of accounts that are not produced by people trained and accredited to provide us with information. It is legitimate to be wary of people like Elliott Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, because the reality is that he is not an expert. The promise of technology and open-source investigation must be balanced with caution. Ultimately, we cannot all become investigators. We cannot, and in my view should not, expect trust to disappear. Trust is a fundamental part of the social contract, and without it we cannot live in community. So in my view, it is much more important to revise the norms of the institutions from which we expect the truth, to invest in accountability mechanisms, and to further decentralize power so that institutions are able to hold each other to account. That is much more productive than an environment where everything is questioned.

I am excited about the possibilities that open source investigations will offer, particularly in terms of holding powerful individuals, institutions, and states to account. I am equally excited about working to restore trust in our institutions.