Some three years after The Guardian redeveloped its website to include new media the site is still leading the way in online reporting.
But this does not mean that it always get it right.
In 2007 a Reuters photojournalist, Namir Noor-Eldeen, was killed in Iraq after being fired upon by a U.S. helicopter gunship. The photojournalists were among at least eight people killed in the same incident.
According to The Pentagon the military personnel mistook the journalists’ cameras for weapons and opened fire believing them to be ‘insurgents.’
This week the website WikiLeaks released a video that they claimed to have obtained from sources inside The Pentagon. The video shows the point-of-view of the camera mounted on the helicopter gun. It also shows the conversation between the military personnel on the aircraft and back at their Military Command HQ.
The video shows the gunship fire on the group of men, circle them and then fire again anyone still walking.
In The Guardian’s account of the video its article contains only one link. This is to the Wikileaks page http://collateralmurder.com/.
From a technical perspective (and from a search engine’s perspective) such a link in the body copy of a web document is read as a ‘recommendation’ by this site to the Wikileaks site. Therefore in this instance The Guardian is not only reporting the Wikileaks site but is actively recommending it as an authoritative site (there are very simply way to link to an external site without providing such a ‘recommendation’).
So are there implications to linking to other sites?
I’m not saying that The Guardian should not link to external content, it definitely should, but does new media praxis raise new ethical questions.
In this article there are three parties involved, WikiLeaks, Reuters and The Pentagon. I believe that liking to one of these.
I would make the argument that when a writer/blogger links to an article or document that are telling their readers that in order to understand full what I am saying you also need to understand this other important content.
In this case the reader would also need to understand The Pentagon’s and Reuters positions to fully understand the story. Of course free will plays a role in the online environment, users could if they wished search these sources on Google but if the journalist/blogger takes it upon themselves to provide this additional information should they not do so as fully and as transparently as possible?
