Drones and Journalism by Phil Chamberlain

Author:Phil Chamberlain [Chamberlain, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781317211037
Google: 1M0NDgAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 34168212
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

Farmers were, unsurprisingly, less enthusiastic, citing it as an invasion of privacy, but Pearson said: “People are entitled to know and see what’s going on.” The activists had reportedly spent $14,000 buying a drone and sent operators on a training course before they could fly it. In this chapter we’ll consider the use of drones for investigative journalism and by activists, and it is deliberate that these are covered together. Some of the first recorded instances of drones being used to gather information to inform the public involve either activists or investigative journalists and the former have done much to test the technical and legal boundaries of what is possible. One of the first examples didn’t involve a journalist at all. In 2011 a man from Texas was flying his new drone near Dallas when he noticed that a river by an old meat packing plant was heavily discoloured. “I was looking at images after the flight that showed a blood red creek and was thinking, could this really be what I think it is? Can you really do that, surely not?” (quoted in Keneally 2012). He alerted the coastguard and several agencies launched an investigation. It turned out the plant was leaking pig blood into the creek, which turned red a major river. Meanwhile various studies have looked at the different possible journalistic applications of drones and aside from covering disasters (as discussed in the last chapter) their investigative potential is the other aspect often highlighted. Goldberg et al. warn their use could move journalists closer to that of private detectives:

Aerial platforms, for example, would make it possible to discretely follow public officials or others to clandestine meetings or to hover outside windows photographing or even listening in on meetings. With high definition cameras, it might be possible even to photograph documents at a distance.

(Goldberg et al. 2013: 24)

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