Washington, June 20: The elitist Tweeters of the world are beginning to annoy me.
I’m not talking about the majority of Tweeters out there. I’m talking about that group of fanboys who have jumped on the Twitter-is-the-greatest-news-source-ever bandwagon and are predicting that it will be the downfall of mainstream media.
You may think I’m biased – I work for the mainstream media after all – that doesn’t mean I don’t recognise that mainstream media is struggling to handle new technology.
Let’s face it, mainstream media nearly had its hat handed to them this week over the coverage of events following the elections in Iran. To be fair, many news outlets were handicapped from the beginning by the Iranian government who clamped down on them, but that excuse isn’t going to help them keep their viewership/readership.
Thanks to a never-ending stream of Tweets coming directly from Iranians, the world quickly got a better picture of the situation there than mainstream media was able to provide. Those Tweets included not only messages but pictures and video.
The information coming out via Twitter was so informative that the US government even asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance period that would have taken the service offline for a few hours during the height of the protests.
Despite Iran government blocks on social networking sites, legions of techies from around the world have helped Iranians find a way to get around those challenges.
Even the Tweets themselves can tell others how to bypass government filters. One tweet I found contained code that claimed it could create an online proxy server, which would help create additional ways for Iranians to get their information online.
So in the face of that kind of evidence, why would I say that mainstream media stands a snowball’s chance in hell of competing? Because for the most part, the information coming out of Iran isn’t news. There was no attempt to filter out bias, misinformation or the plainly wrong. It was raw information, which in itself has value, but it simply doesn’t tell the whole story. Mainstream media still provides context and a broader view.
There is also the question of accuracy. Call me a cynic but I just don’t trust people. I have had educated business professionals from major international corporations look me in the face and tell me lies that a 10-year-old could see through. For example, executives launching a new product have claimed they will have growth of 10 per cent. When asked just how they plan to achieve this 10 per cent on nothing, all you get is silence bordering on embarrassment at being exposed.
However, I’m not so cynical that I believe an entire nation is lying to us. It’s really hard – even foolish -to argue against thousands of corroborating messages and pictures, but it doesn’t mean everyone is telling the truth either.
People lie. Pictures can be faked. And Twitter had no mechanism to filter this out. The mainstream media – which also frequently fails to filter this out – at least makes the attempt. Journalists may be fallible but at least they’re trying.
That doesn’t mean mainstream media isn’t in trouble. The landscape changes quickly online. For all I know, a website that finds a way to tie together all this information – accurately – in a way that delivers a knock-out blow to the CNNs and the BBCs of the world is just around the corner.
However, it isn’t there yet.
—Agencies–