Giving new meaning to eyewitness accounts, the digital way

In John Grisham's "The Testament," there is a character in the legal drama novel named Snead who is identified as the driver and assistant to the main protagonist billionaire Troy Phelan. He is reported to have witnessed and knew everything about Phelan. He knew his philandering ways and even witnessed when he committed suicide.

However, when Snead discovered that his master had died without leaving anything for having worked for him for many years and as he had on various dates promised, he decides to yarn an account that would suit him to inflict revenge and earn from lawyers who were seeking to challenge Troy’s holographic will.

Snead's account reminds me of journalism and eyewitness accounts. More often than not, the media is not a first-hand witness to events and mainly rely on eyewitnesses to tell the story. It is assumed that the eyewitnesses will tell the story as they saw and the journalists can only use their skills to document and attribute the happenings to the eyewitnesses.

Majorly, eyewitnesses will give accounts based on what they can recollect or depending on the subjective angle that they want the story to be framed. The framing, like that of Snead also depends on the relationship with the people they are giving information about.

To guard against subjective witnesses, the fathers of journalism invented the aspect of confirmation so as to balance the accounts given. Confirmation was meant to ensure that the probability of giving highly exaggerated accounts or information that supports only one side was eliminated.

That is reason why no editor will pass a journalists report without asking who confirmed. Editors will also seek for diverse witness accounts so as to establish the points of convergence that would fully support a story.

The last few months have however given the aspect of witness account new meaning. With the emergence of internet enabled high resolution phone cameras and Facebook live eye witnessing is no longer the same. Today’s eyewitnesses record accounts of happenings on their digital enabled devices and therefore do not have to rely purely on recollection to be able to tell what they saw.

The case of the shooting of Philado Castille by a police officer in the USA is a recent example of eyewitness account going a notch higher. In the video, Philando’s girlfriend recorded the events “live” and even went ahead to give commentary about the circumstances that led to the shooting dead of her boyfriend.

While there were ethical issues about the live reporting, the girl said she just wanted the world to know what happened to her boyfriend.

Closer home, the video recording by an unidentified civilian of the attack on the Central Police Station in Mombasa early last month is a case in point. In the video, believed to have been recorded by someone living in the flats next to the police station, police officers were seen struggling to escape from the first floor of the police station whose ground floor was on smoke.

Journalists who did not witness the incident had to rely on the neighbours for non-subjective accounts of the attack. What one can argue is that the recorded accounts are incontrovertible and therefore leave officialdom with little chance to give an official position, deny or even spin the accounts.

Journalists going to cover events must therefore be prepared to ask the eyewitnesses they find on site whether there is one of them that recorded the events as they happened.

I am certain that had the Brenda Chepkoech Sugut versus Chris Brown story followed that line of thought it would have been reported differently. What was available was not enough to inform the reader to make a decision on whether the “personality-selfie” loving girl had her phone broken as she claimed.

The questions that linger in my mind are, were there no other people who recorded the happenings? Could media houses have come across the footage from eyewitnesses and because of other interests decided not to run the story? The seven seconds video that was available online was too short to make a decision? Is there a possibility that there was more footage?

Ends…..