What’s going on in front of all of us on the television and the Internet about the recent election in Iran is synmptomatic (or emblematic ?) of the shifts in power that interconnectedness and the ability tio publish to the web are inexorably bringing to all of our lives, in one way or another.
This article (excerpts below) laments the weak if noit ineffective work the mainstream media is offering, and points to the expanded role of the internet and social media.
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We Had To Kill The Media In Order To Save It
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The fact that the best reporting on the Iranian election crisis is coming from Twitter and random comments from students inside the country is not necessarily a testament to the expansive power of new media but to the irredeemable failure of the old media.
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The major TV networks have almost no international bureaus anymore, pooling their resources in London and sending out correspondents to act as individual news gathering machines, one-man or woman networks without the benefit of producers or editorial desks. This allows for a bit more flexibility, but also flattens the landscape so that the news-gathering capabilities of established media differ in no legitimate respect from a native speaker with a Twitter account or a Facebook page. It’s not that the tweeters have ascended into the media stratosphere, it’s that the traditional media has descended into the depths.
A few national newspapers do seem to have decent reporting on the ground. And thanks to the Internet, we can access a good deal of information about the world from local sources. And some bloggers, like those at the National Iranian American Council and Tehran Bureau (until they were shut down, allegedly by a denial of service attack from inside Iran), are doing heroic work.
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I don’t really have a solution to this, but the paucity of the Fourth Estate in this international crisis just leaves me sad.
…To balance out this post with some respect for the organizing capability of Twitter, please wear green tomorrow in support of the reformers in Iran. Maybe Abbi Tatton (CNN social media presenter) will report on it!
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I think that last line is snark.
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