REMEDIATING #IRANELECTION

Abstract

When mass protests and violent crackdown followed the 2009 Iranian presidential election, Western mass media found themselves in a precarious situation: eager to report on the unfolding events, but without access to them; save through snapshots and text bites posted to content-sharing sites by unknown users. Basing news coverage on such content challenged journalistic understandings of credibility as produced by professional routines, thus disturbing the foundation of epistemic authority on which professional journalism builds. Neglecting it, however, would challenge journalism's ability to portray anything at all. This article investigates how the positioning of citizen micro-journalism was textually negotiated in news reports by attributing different degrees of epistemic authority to citizen-made content. It argues that the strategies used greatly privilege the unknown image vis-à-vis the unknown verbal report. While verbal reports are treated as illustrative of communication practices or attributed doubt, images are allowed to represent the crisis, and frequently made indistinguishable from professionally produced content. Furthermore, in attributing citizen-made content to news agencies and mediation channels, the incorporation practices treat intermediation as a source of credibility. Deconstructing the process of constructing epistemologically authoritative news thus highlights how mediation, news values, source practices, and image conventions are relied on to perform credibility.