Letter from London: Murdoch, News of the World & The Video Revolution

We report... you decide...

We are in London all this week running The Guardian Media Academy video bootcamp.

The Guardian is a particularly interesting place to be this week.

For our friends in America who may not be keeping up with events here, Britain is undergoing it's own kind of Watergate - a massive upheaval brought about by unrelenting investigative journalism.

In 1969, The Washington Post under the stewardship of Ben Bradlee brought down the Nixon Administration.

Now, The Guardian, under the stewardship of its managing editor Alan Rusbridger, seems about to bring down not a government, but the media empire of Rupert Murdoch.

To compress a fairly complex story, Murdoch (who owns Fox and The New York Post, among a massive list of newspapers, broadcasters and Hollywood studios), owned a very popular tabloid newspaper in England called News of the World (NOW).  It was revealed through The Guardian's exhaustive and unrelenting journalism, that NOW reporters and apparently management had been tapping into phone of private citizens (including a kidnapped and murdered 13-year old girl); paying off the police for information and apparently covering up the whole scandal.

Now, as it has surfaced, Murdoch has closed down the News or the World, a newspaper with a 165 year old history.

All quite astonishing - and apparently, from the looks of it, just the tip of the iceberg.

Murdoch was set to purchase total ownership of BSkyB, the biggest broadcaster in the UK. This appears to be dead in the water, and even that seems to be just th beginning of what could be the unravelling of the Murdoch empire.

All of which brings us to the question of who controls the information that you get.

This is the crux of the BSkysB issue, but it also beggars a larger question.

Murdoch is an unquestioned Press Lord - that's what they call them here - and there is a long tradition of Press Lords.

Freedom of the Press, HL Mencken once noted, is assured only for those who own a press.

And it is true that for the entire history of journalism, the press was an expensive toy to own - and an extremely powerful one, as anyone who has run for office in the US or the UK will readily acknowlege.

But now, for the first time in history, it is possible for anyone - anyone - to 'own' a press.

Or a broadcast video operation.

All it really takes is a laptop and internet access.

Ironically, last week we were in Geneva where we spent a week training the staff of the UNHCR - that is, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees - to shoot and edit their own video.

These are extremely dedicated and remarkably selfless people who place themselves in harm's way daily to save millions of lives.

While we were in Geneva, a massive refugee crisis was breaking out in Kenya and Somalia. More than 10 million people are at risk of starvation.

The UNHCR was flying in its staff as quickly as they could trying to save lives.

By supplying the UNHCR staff with cameras and laptops, we are able to have them report first hand on what they know so intimately.

When I suggested that UNHCR could become a news source for US networks and others, I was told that there was resistance to airing information created by UNHCR staffers - questions about its 'journalistic integrity'.

Really.

Really.

Take a look at the unravelling mess in Murdoch's empire and tell me: who do you trust more to tell you the truth.  The employess of Fox News or the aid workers on the ground in Somalia and Kenya.

Give each of them a camera and a laptop.

Now, who do you trust more?

We report

You decide.