A couple of confessions I never thought I would make. 1. I found some value in twitter yesterday, as I spent most of the day following the stunning and at times heart breaking events from Iran. There is a kind of "you-are-there" quality that is engaging. I also found that, following an event like this on twitter you really find yourself using the whole modern electronic tool box, as you follow links that take you to facebook and youtube and flickr and HuffPo and lots of other places. However, the noise problem is even worse than I at first thought it would be. If you just look for stories on "Iran" you are likely to get the worst kind of crap mixed in with occasional nugets of information; when I narrowed my search to the tag suggested here (#iranelection) the ratio got significantly better, but still a lot of misinformation, or at least unverified information. twitter and FB were alive with reports that the regime was dropping either boiling water or acid from helicopters onto protestors, that the regime was using ambulances to arrest injured protestors, that European embassies were (and were not) taking injured protestors - and that the regieme was staking out these embassies and arresting protestors who tried to approach.This morning FB was reporting that Mousavi had been arrested. Most of this I have not seen confirmed on actual news sites, and I am not sure how helpful it would have been to people on the ground in Iran, and it might have done more harm than good. Still, watching the tragic story of Neda unfold yesterday was moving and heartbreaking and fascinating to see it galvinize the online community.
2. About 5:45 pm (PT) yesterday I switched over to follow the story on television - and could not find anything about it on either CNN or MSNBC, which were both running regular, pretaped programs. For what I am sure is the first time in my life I intentionally tuned to Fox News Channel to get information - and found Shepheard Smith reporting the latest news from Iran, which I watched for 15 minutes. The reporting was good - once you discount the kind of smarmy, pandering style that turns my stomach (and, it must be said, the CNN anchors have their own pandering style that is also off-putting). At 6:00 I fled to check the other channels, and was relieved to find Christiane Amanpour was on. I am sure CNN and MSNBC covered the story most of the day, and I may just have checked in at one of the few times FNC was on the story and they were not. Still, if it had been the other way around I may well have commented on it, so I make the comment in their favor now. By far the most helpful source in following this story has been Nico Pitney at HuffPo ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/13/iran-demonstrations-viole_n_215189.html). I'm sure he will win some kind of award for his live blog, which is the cloeset thing I have found to an editor for the salad bowl (sometimes toilet bowl) of reportst swirling around on the internet. Not everything appears on his blog first (I found a number of items elsewhere before they showed up there) but a lot of stuff did show up there first, and I learned to give more credibiltiy to whatever he did report - partly because when he found out he was wrong about something, he promptly corrected it. All in all I found yesterday to be similar to election day 2004, which I followed closely on the internet, and learned a lot of things that were not broadcast on the tv news, about a third of which turned out to be true. It is fascingating and sometimes exhilerating, but very time consuming to follow these stories yourself on the web, and difficult to sort out the reliable information. This is why I still believe that we need - perhaps now more than ever - robust and professional television journalism. I hope we get that sometime day soon. And Nico posted this today from a reader in Iran, showing that the old ways may still be the best ways: "Also - what is happening now with regards to spreading information to the people. They are going back to 79 strategies. basically they are printing papers having people distribute them all over the country. twitter/net etc is not effective right now - they are going back to old-fashioned style." --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ TV or Not TV .... Smart (TV) People on Ice! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
