the Armchair of El Diablo

News Cycles & AntiTwitterganda 2

News Cycles & AntiTwitterganda

By now, you’d know that Twitter broke the bin Laden operation story, via IT Consultant, Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual).

That Twitter got the collective scoop is, in itself, old news now. We’re used to hearing about rumours that flare into gossip, then burst into news from the tweet-vine.

What we’re less used to is hearing how Twitter provides two things sorely lacking in news today: context and perspective.

When @ReallyVirtual started his now famous tweetstream about flyswatters and helicopters, he didn’t only inform the interverse about the minute-by-minute happenings of a clandestine operation.

He did something far more important:he made the foreign less alien.

With emoticons, fluent English, and deadpan jokes you’d expect from any IT guy in your office, he managed to convey a context that was far more familiar than the baffling images of minarets, burning flags and AK-47s that we’ve come to automatically associate with Pakistan.

John Stewart joked that ‘Abbatabad’ was exactly the sort of place name that New Yorkers would have invented, if they didn’t know the name of the place where the operation occurred.

The truth of the joke is that we deliberately use preconceptions and stereotypes to separate ourselves from the fact that bin Laden was a person – albeit a total douchebag of one – living amongst people who are actually not too different from ourselves.

This is a very convenient perspective to forget in times of war… or when we want to simulate a time of war. The alienness of foreign countries is important to promote when we want to do things there, we wouldn’t otherwise do here.

In today’s Crikey, Pakistani resident Wajeehah Sabahat wrote:

“Tears flowing down their faces, anguished facial expressions, bearded faces. These are the pictures from Pakistan news about people mourning and protesting for Osama bin Laden. What the international media repeatedly fails to mention is that these pictures belong to a very small clan of people, who do not share their views or opinion with the majority of the population.

I am talking about people of Pakistan, who watch movies, listen to music, play sports and live life in a normal way and who are devoid of any sadistic sense of brutality or vengeance.”

Through Twitter, @ReallyVirtual, provided a tweet stream of consciousness that was unfiltered, and without agenda; providing a context that made the (often inconvenient) similarity of people a little harder to forget.

As a result, Twitter provided a news source that was crucial to the story not for its immediacy, but its raw reality.

6 May 2011

Press Freedom in the Pacific Islands: who gives a shit

Why should we care about media freedoms in the South Pacific? They’re just a bunch of tiny islands with palm trees and great beaches. You don’t need a free press to get tourists.

Why? Because we’ll soon know even less than the little we know now about our neighbours. And because without a functioning media, society sickens.

As a Fijian-based journo mate said to me:

“Who in the entire Pacific believes the problems with the media have anything to do with foreign ownership!? Craven bureaucrats (incl favoured expats) mouth their scripted lines to the point where they believe their own bullshit. And it works. Passivity reigns. The region will feel the backwash from B’s [Commodore Bainimarama] master plan when the gangster state exports its model to island leaders who fear nothing more than politically engaged citizens - resisting bribes and intimidation - casting their vote.”

And also because when finally we do care its usually just in enough time to blunder in with costly, paternalistic missions that threaten lives and relations.

In the meantime, with barely a sniff from us, another journo falls on his sword. But really, does it matter?

————— Forwarded message —————
From: John Woods <john@cookislandsnews.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 12:07 PM
Subject: [pacific-journos] PINA Resignation
To: pacificmedia@googlegroups.com

To the President, Board Members and General Manager of the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA):

Kia orana Moses, board members and Matai

…Today’s media freedom situation in Fiji, whereby the Decree is now in force, is totally intolerable. A body like PINA should have led the outrage 24 hours ago. Our board’s inaction on this fundamental issue is already a bone of contention among members and past members, and I am ashamed that we have reneged on our Constitutional obligation to oppose censorship and media controls in Fiji….

…My particular issues, as stated before, are:

In terms of our primary reason for existence, to uphold freedom of expression and a free press, PINA has lost its mojo. Our silence on Fiji and our tolerance of media restrictions is unacceptable. Maintaining a secretariat and a news service in Fiji is also unacceptable….

…Pacnews is compromised because of its Fiji location, has already suffered from military intervention and censorship, and is not being reviewed/restructured as agreed by the board in December 2009.

I am resigning with sincere regret and in frustration, but with confidence that independent media operators in the Pacific will not let the troubles with PINA spoil or undermine the future and prosperity of our industry.

John Woods
Managing Editor
Cook Islands News

e john@cookislandsnews.com
w www.cookislandsnews.com
p (+682) 22999 f (+682) 25303
PO Box 15 Rarotonga Cook Islands

1 July 2010

The News Empire Strikes Back

Paid content’s back on the agenda, and aaaall the kids are talking about it. Well, Murdoch and Media Watch are… so, a few old, wrinkly kids.

A part of Murdoch’s argument is that it’s actually in society’s interest to pay for news content.

There are two issues here, and it’s in Murdoch’s interest to confuse them.

Firstly, there’s the issue of ‘quality’ journalism - and the crisis of its absence. The news agenda has been skewed for years by a combination of distortion and irrelevancies.

The second issue is a crisis of business. The current business models of ad-funded content are unsustainable, with aggregators and bloggers drawing away audience numbers from the news sites.

Murdoch’s argument is that the two issues are indelibly linked: Quality Journalism is being eroded by the scythed budgets resulting from online stealing its product.

But here Murdoch is deliberately muddying the water.

It’s true, it’s a hard time to be a reporter, and society will suffer as good investigative journalism diminishes. But while this has been exacerbated by online outlaws, the bloggers and aggregators were not the cause. And even if we did flick the off-switch on the Internet machine tomorrow, the issues with Quality Journalism would remain.

As covered by Nick Davies in his cutting and cunning book, Flat Earth News , the distortion of the news agenda kicked off with the commercialisation of news outlets in the 70s and 80s.

As news became more about driving readership to attract ad dollars, less challenging and more palatable news agendas emerged: the rise of infotainment.

So if market forces killed the radio star, how can we say that preventing the erosion of those same market forces is the answer to bringing said dead star back to life?

Perhaps Murdoch is precisely wrong, and a little consolidation is what we all need.

The pity is that its journalists who are taking the bullet.

22 October 2009