In defence of bloggers - the ultimate primary source

Thinker reminds us that …

Blogs, email and text messages, while lending themselves to informing, also lend themselves to abuse.

… in his post that argues it is irresponsible for us to report the blast in Nairobi as bomb or indeed suicide bomb unless we have official confirmation from the police. Agreed, it would be irresponsible for us to report the blast without checking the sources of the stories.

When I first heard the story on local radio stations I turned to Reuters which is a reliable news outlet and generally has an impeccable record as far as the accuracy of its reporting goes.

Reuters report now reads (bear in mind these reports are constantly updated):

A senior policeman at the scene said the explosion, which also left a mangled corpse in the street and sent passers-by flying through the air, seemed to be a suicide bombing.

My own blog post on the topic is full of qualifiers, apparently this, apparently that. I even put a paragraph at the end of the post cautioning that this is all speculation at the moment as we await the facts.

A quick look at the KenyaUnlimited Aggregator shows many other Kenyan bloggers qualified their reporting too.

Let me bring in another angle. The most common complaint I have heard today from Kenyans abroad is that the the Daily Nation and East African Standard websites had almost no information for a long while. The most frequently updated Kenyan news website these days is the KBC website, however earlier this morning when I checked it was down.

I would argue that it is stories like this that rather than showing the danger of blogs, HIGHLIGHT the importance of blogs and other citizen media. While the MSM was stuck in its procedures, bloggers wrote about what they had heard, seen or were told. There is nothing wrong with quoting primary sources. The historians amongst us can confirm the importance with which primary sources are regarded on any historical event. The eyewitness account, the man on the street as it were.

If you wanted to know what Kenyans were thinking and feeling at the time the blogs were a very good place to start.

As for waiting for an official police statement before commenting on this blast, to that I would ask: where is the lengthy police statement on the Mungiki crisis? Where is the lengthy police statement on the Mount Elgon clashes? Both were major incidents in the past month which claimed more lives that the blast this morning, yet we haven’t seen the same coordinated response to dishing out information as we have on this blast. Are we to await the official statement on those events as well before stepping in with our take on events? How long are you prepared to wait?

Isn’t it telling that Police Commissioner Hussein’s lengthy statement appears on the website of the Office of Government Spokesperson (OGS) and not on the Kenya Police website which carries a 3 sentence press release by the Police Spokesman?

Why would the OGS jump in on this story when Mungiki and Mount Elgon were much more serious events yet he restrained himself? I would argue it is because the OGS quickly realised that this was an international story which would generate interest from around the world.

Their intention was not to inform, their intention was damage control. I will agree with the Commish on one thing, however, in my opinion, the disaster management procedures worked well, after the initial shock everything seemed to click.

I firmly believe that the take up of the story by Kenyan bloggers helped generate this international interest. Don’t believe that bloggers have that much influence? Then explain why the “Blog Search button” is next to the “Advanced News Search” button on Google News or why Reuters has started featuring African bloggers prominently on its news site. In a round about way, the noise bloggers generated about this story is one of the reasons The Commish and the GOS rushed to get out that press release.

Hopefully if Kenyan bloggers keep the noise up on Mungiki, Mount Elgon et al and the Commish and the GOS will rush to release a lengthy press release on those stories as well.