is the stage on to which Jihadi John and the other Islamic State murderers have made their swaggering entrance … ours is the culture of the repeat, the freeze frame and the slow motion action sequence.
These images exemplify the ever-present nature of today’s user-generated content dominating the diet of daily news, from Facebook newsfeeds to Twitter – what Beckett and Deuze term the ubiquitous and pervasive nature of media in everyday life (2016: 1).
The other major cultural shift has been the rise of populism and distrust in mainstream news, fuelled by social media and politicians who have been able to take their policies and sometimes extreme views straight to the people, cutting out the gatekeeping of traditional media. The increasingly polarised political and social debate in countries such as the United Kingdom and United States has led to scepticism towards experts and common perceptions, from all political flavours, that the media are biased. The sociologist and political economist William Davies believes there has been a fundamental change in mindset that goes beyond distrust (2019):
The appearance of digital platforms, smartphones and the ubiquitous surveillance they enable has ushered in a new public mood that is instinctively suspicious of anyone claiming to describe reality in a fair and objective fashion.
Davies argues that once public life is infused with doubt, people become increasingly dependent on their own experiences and their own beliefs about how the world works, with the result that facts no longer seem to matter. The explosion of information available to us is simply making it harder to achieve a consensus on what is the truth. On top of this, the polarisation of British society over Brexit and the inflammatory nature of parliamentary debate over the issue has clearly fuelled an emotionalisation and coarsening of public discourse. The former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani captures in her critique of social media culture the paradox between what she calls the breath-taking innovation and entrepreneurship spurred by the Internet and a cascade of misinformation and relativism (2018). She laments how the term ‘truth decay’ has now entered the post-truth lexicon that already includes phrases such as ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’. Davies adds:
What we are witnessing, is a collision between two conflicting ideals of truth: one that depends on trusted intermediaries (journalists & experts), and another that promises the illusion of direct access to reality itself.
The attraction of user-generated content
Why then has mainstream media embraced the type of emotive content that is generated by social media and the climate of populism with such enthusiasm?
At an economic level, the answer lies in the way traditional business models of news have been steadily undermined by social media, syphoning away advertising and subscription revenues and leading to widespread editorial staffing cuts. According to the former editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, news organisations face no less than an existential economic threat (2018). The Pew Research Center (2019) has estimated that newsroom jobs in the United States dropped by 25% between 2008 and 2018, driven primarily by cost cuts at newspapers. In the United Kingdom, 228 newspapers have closed since 2005 (Press Gazette, 2018). In this climate of cost-cutting, user-generated content has often been used as a last resort to fill gaps in news coverage, particularly in the area of foreign news, where many news organisations have closed their foreign bureaux. Other areas of foreign news, such as the Syrian civil war, have simply become too dangerous for Western correspondents to cover on a routine basis, meaning an increased reliance on stringers, freelancers and those caught up in conflict.
User-generated content has also allowed consumers of news to see news they would only have been able to read about in the past. Passers-by capturing events on a mobile phone simply by dint of being present (sometimes termed ‘accidental journalism’ or ‘citizen witnessing’) has transformed audience expectations. There is, of course, a long history of bystanders witnessing news, not least the legendary Abraham Zapruder frames of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy (discussed in detail in Chapter 7). But the first cases of such images in the digital era can be traced back to the Asian tsunami of December 2004 when holidaymakers captured the devastating impact of tidal waves from hotel balconies. In the United Kingdom, the pivotal moment came in July 2005 when the London underground system was bombed. Camera crews had no access, but passengers caught up in the attacks started sending mobile phone pictures to news organisations. Helen Boaden, who was the BBC’s Director of News at the time, identified the attacks as a watershed and ‘the point at which the BBC knew that news gathering had changed forever’ (2008). In a BBC blog on the changing news landscape and July 7 attacks, she wrote:
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