During a session entitled Media in a Shifting Arab World, former CNN journalist Octavia Nasr said that news networks' reliance on citizen journalists was risky but necessary when they are left with no other choice.
Speaking of her own experience covering the 2009 pro-democracy uprising in Iran for CNN, she said that media from citizen journalists coming from Iran was analysed by a team of specialists who were familiar with the country, its geography and its landmarks.
"We would even call people in the areas the images were alleged to have come from to corroborate the news," she said.
Citizen journalists
However the danger of relying on citizen journalists was also highlighted when clips were shown of errors made by Reuters, Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera where older footage was mistakenly aired, falsely claimed to have been filmed in Yemen and Syria, both of which currently face uprisings.
Nabil Al Khatib, editor of Al Arabiya, said such events are used by regimes to discredit news channels, suggesting that some false news could be planted by governments looking to shame the channels and undermine their credibility.
Objective
Asked if Saudi-owned Al Arabiya cover the country objectively, Khatib said his channel covered Saudi Arabia "to an extent" but cautioned the audience from believing that Arab media was "free to cover any topic without taking certain things into consideration".
"Our journalists neet to get salaries," he said. "There is an impression that owners of private news channels don't have interests. They do. Yes, they can be adventurous - either with their advertisers or with their viewers," he said.
Abeer Al Najjar, a professor of mass communications at the American University of Sharjah, said that news channels needed to "strategically build their credibility".
"If media rises in Tunisia or Egypt [which have recently ousted their regimes after pro-democracy protests], what will happen to Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya?" she said.
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