citizens in danger

Last week BBC encouraged people inside Burma to share their stories: Accounts from inside Burma. At the very bottom of the web page, the following message has been written: "At no time should you endanger yourself or others, take any unnecessary risks or infringe any laws." Appropriate of course, considering Burmese people risk jail and abuse for telling the world what has been going on. It's "citizen journalism" at its most interesting and perhaps cruel, mass media actors taking advantage of the upsurge of amateur quasi-reporters in conflict-areas. With the possibility of air-time on BBC and CNN, people will probably be more willing to take chances. It must represent a rather delicate dilemma for the media industry, and I don't know whether a warning such as the one above solves it.