In 2004, NBC News correspondent Kevin Sites offered the world a shocking glimpse into the Iraq war, when he released footage to the media of a U.S. Marine shoot and kill an unarmed, dying man in a Fallujah mosque. He was both criticized and praised for filming the incident. During this time, Kevin Sites’s blog became a reliable source of the daily action in Iraq, when many networks had stopped sending reporters there and offered only snippets of information about the war's progress.
Through his experience in covering war zones around the world, Sites has customized a reporting style coined solo journalism (“SoJo”) and provides to his readers a continued, up-close perspective of war conflict in third world countries. Most Americans are not informed about the situations that emerge in a war conflict or the actions that take place in countries that have unstable governments. Sites offers an unedited look into these places and conditions.
Sites visited the USC campus on March 20, 2007 and spoke to students at the Annenberg School for Communication. He shared his vision with students about the future of news reporting, since having become Yahoo! News’s first featured reporter.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone is a Yahoo-sponsored news site dedicated to Sites’s third world journeys and transports multimedia news reporting into the American mainstream media. When Sites visits war zones, he is responsible for writing and shooting the footage, which he then sends back to Yahoo! electronically, and by satellite. One of the goals of Sites’s Yahoo!-sponsored site is to get people involved in discussions about current world conflicts. By reporting some of the narratives of people caught up in war events, the site hopes to put a human face on war and bring Americans closer to the people involved in these conflicts.
“22 different conflict zones, 19 different countries, 3,000 pictures posted, 153 dispatches, and something like 130 video clips,” is how Sites described his activities in one year.
He risks his life to supply the American public with solid information about world conflicts. In the process, he has been called a traitor. But is our system of democracy an Establishment or an avenue of active-participation where people like Sites should travel? When we stop talking and allow political elites to debate our country’s decisions, what is democracy then? These are questions that Sites’s form of news reporting might address in an often compliant American political climate.
