MSM Pwned by Amateurs
The Denver Post admits the glaring, obvious truth: Amateur journalists are pwning mainstream media.
Two revolutions may have been sparked in Iran this week, one on the ground in Tehran, the other in journalism.
With the snap of cellphone cameras and the click of "upload" buttons, the job of delivering the world's biggest news story in real time switched from a few TV networks to thousands of amateur journalists posting words and images on the Web.
The shift was so pronounced that Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American author and cable-news pundit touring Denver this week, didn't even bother to follow the story on TV, which he dismissed as "a snapshot of my computer from eight hours ago."
CNN was out. Twitter and Facebook were out front. Turns out a repressive government can keep foreign correspondents from reporting, but it can no longer keep its own people, fluent in technology, from telling their own story.
As the legendary foreign correspondent of earlier eras was sidelined, the conventional TV networks resorted to putting pictures of computer screens on the air. The now iconic cellphone images of Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, fatally shot on the street, framed the political story.
1 comment:
People want reliable, objective, and nimble media sources. This is why the MSM has failed. The MSM has become too engaged in making commentaries and propaganda that it cannot cover huge events such as those in Iran. Technology has enabled anybody to report and the perspective of an amateur conveys a much more authentic account than some veteran "journalist" for FOX, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, or CNN.
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