ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses news imagery of the Baltimore crisis by examining multiple reportorial inflections across a diverse journalistic ecology, particularly social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. The still and video imagery emanating on social media from such a diverse array of Baltimore's citizens provided alternative vantage points from which to understand the nature of the city's crisis. In the months since the Baltimore crisis, further instances of police violence in US cities have sparked public protests with alarming regularity, consistently underscoring the sousveillant power of citizen witnessing shared across social media. The uneven, contradictory narratives that emerge in such contexts disrupt familiar assumptions. The proliferation of social media spaces have facilitated and enriched ad hoc practices of "sousveillance", extending new possibilities for self-conscious tactics of resistance amongst ordinary citizens confronting the bitter realities of systemic prejudice and discrimination.
