Media... FAIL!
There's a lot of talk lately about the rise of the blogs, talk which is crowned by Twitter becoming the main form of reporting in Iran, currently. More and more, people are getting their news from blogs, and from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, which are not considered traditional news outlets. MSM are wringing their hands, wondering... why? Why?
The answer is: Because you are Fail.
A while ago, I read a novel written by a Cuban poet called 'El hombre, la hembra, y el hambre'. The novel was set in Cuba, and a good deal of it centered around life there. It's where my interest in Cuba that would eventually culminate in my choice of it as the setting for the first story of Danse Perilleaux (the graphic novel) came from.
One of the things that she talks about in that novel is that because nobody trusts the state media, knowing them to be nothing but a controlled mouthpiece for the government, everyone gets their information by way of rumor and word of mouth. That stuck with me at the time, and I've remembered it more and more as I've watched the MSM fall deeper and deeper into the pockets of the establishment. The media used to be the watchdogs of the government, but now the phrase 'media watchdog' has started to crop up. Their terrible, stilted coverage of the events of the last 8+ years, never contradicting the party line, never asking the hard questions (like... 'can home values -really- keep going up?'), all reporting effectively the same thing on effectively the same thing and all of them with their shiny new computer toys and stupid graphics flashing around in hope that we'll be dazzled and forget that we're not watching news anymore have disillusioned us all.
In short, they're more, at this point, like the state media of Cuba and Iran than the free press of the Founding Fathers. It's the bloggers who have taken up the banner of free press, inaccuracy, rumor mongering, and all.
And so in this current conflict, both the Americans and the Iranians share a common news source -- Twitter. And we share it because -both- of our official medias cannot be trusted to provide accurate coverage. It's a strange thing for two very, very different cultures to share. I think that Thomas Jefferson, that revolutionary intellectual, would be proud of us.
The answer is: Because you are Fail.
A while ago, I read a novel written by a Cuban poet called 'El hombre, la hembra, y el hambre'. The novel was set in Cuba, and a good deal of it centered around life there. It's where my interest in Cuba that would eventually culminate in my choice of it as the setting for the first story of Danse Perilleaux (the graphic novel) came from.
One of the things that she talks about in that novel is that because nobody trusts the state media, knowing them to be nothing but a controlled mouthpiece for the government, everyone gets their information by way of rumor and word of mouth. That stuck with me at the time, and I've remembered it more and more as I've watched the MSM fall deeper and deeper into the pockets of the establishment. The media used to be the watchdogs of the government, but now the phrase 'media watchdog' has started to crop up. Their terrible, stilted coverage of the events of the last 8+ years, never contradicting the party line, never asking the hard questions (like... 'can home values -really- keep going up?'), all reporting effectively the same thing on effectively the same thing and all of them with their shiny new computer toys and stupid graphics flashing around in hope that we'll be dazzled and forget that we're not watching news anymore have disillusioned us all.
In short, they're more, at this point, like the state media of Cuba and Iran than the free press of the Founding Fathers. It's the bloggers who have taken up the banner of free press, inaccuracy, rumor mongering, and all.
And so in this current conflict, both the Americans and the Iranians share a common news source -- Twitter. And we share it because -both- of our official medias cannot be trusted to provide accurate coverage. It's a strange thing for two very, very different cultures to share. I think that Thomas Jefferson, that revolutionary intellectual, would be proud of us.