This week's events in Iran have been a defining moment for new media. The people tweeting from demonstrations and uploading video of bloody violence taken with their camera phones have been able to tell a powerful story, in real-time, and circumvent the efforts of the mullahs to control the media and the flow of information. Social networking, often derided as the public preening of people with too much time on their hands, has been transformed into an indispensable tool for organizing and keeping the world informed. You know that journalism's tectonic plates have shifted when the State Department is asking Twitter to postpone shutting down for scheduled repairs so that the on-the-ground citizen reporting coming out of Iran could continue uninterrupted. And happy Father's Day to all our HuffPost Dads!
Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff
I say to President Obama- leave foreign affairs to your SOS- she has the balls to go head to head with those Mullahs and make Iran a true Democracy without us losing one life. We just need to stand unequivocally with the protesters who are risking their lives. Hillary can and will give a speech as she did on Tinnamen Square in China.
Sorry President Obama- on this one- you truly disappointed me- we need to be on the side of human rights, equality, democracy- that is what we are as a nation - and have always been notwithstanding your apology tours
If you think we've "always" stood for human rights, where did we stand for the human rights of the owners of this continent?
If Obama said something intrusive, rather than merely expressing solidarity for the universal right to peaceably assemble, then he'd be giving Ahmadinejad something external to seize onto to polarize Iranian society with a national security loyalty scam.
Instead of this, Iran's overbearing leaders have to face the music in their own cultural context with no "Great Satan" to blame.
Can't MSNBC partner with somebody (Time, Newsweek, NPR, ThinkProgress, Huffington Post) to provide even a second-tier news source? I realize that the die-hard Fox crowd won't turn it on, but independents need somewhere to find progressive news, otherwise they may choose to go to Fox and will get hefty doses of Coulter, Beck, Hannity, Geraldo and other right-wing slants on the news.
PLEASE, please for the sake of the country, PLEASE provide an alternative to Fox News on the weekend.
I have posted this on Newsvine and have emailed it to MSNBC anchors and several other websites. Please go to my Newsvine post and move this up the "Vine." Make MSNBC a weekend news channel, too.
http://slim1921.newsvine.com/_news/2009/06/20/2952237-wheres-the-liberal-media-on-the-weekend
Donald Morris
If not, then this is just another, more immediate and flavorful MASS media (soon to be subsumbed within corporate entertainment). I can't wait for the MSM to tell me!!!
I, for one, have grown increasingly frustrated by the lack of any effective feedback mechanism (he writes as he's posting online) to actually DO something. I hope the HP elves are hard at work on this one!
Most of us who support the people tend to greatly exaggerate our ideas of rights and power that were shaped very long ago. Meanwhile the "un" reality party is so successful even after being devastated repeatedly in elections that they can still win the policy fights, using idiots.
newspapers used to take the time to analyse first ,re-act later.------the new media ???
And, the Huffington Post -- I mean. Nico Pitney should be a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize for journalism -- I know, it's a well-worn phrase this past week, but it's absolutely true!
"Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work
overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex,
gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be
composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered
oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism
from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by
force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon,
for the gross malfeasance of our power elite."
The coverage this week is was and continues to be historical...."For those who win onwards... --the power to bless & save humanity."
However, I hope that this social revolution will not make Iran so weak as to give the US, Israel, GB and the other Western Imperialists of Europe the impetus to bomb and invade Iran and wreck havoc and mayhem to try to privatize their oil-based economy the way it has been done in Iraq.
Isn't it odd the media makes so much of the deaths and political chaos in Iran but makes so little fuss about the massive slaughters the US has caused in Iraq and continues to cause in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The US center/right political/media/corporate establishment gets in high dungeon about everyone else's human rights violations except those committed by the US and its allies in their mad pursuit of corporate/imperial self-interest.
Yes, I would add Gaza too. Ariana, I was very impressed with your comments on numerous networks during the July '06 onslaught upon Lebanon, but did I miss your comments about the war on Gaza? Thanks for all you do to provide a forum for many points of view.
They are actually avoiding censorship at two ends,
first getting around the repression in their own country,
and then avoiding all the editing that would have left most of this
on the mainstream media's cutting floors!
Really, what of this would we have seen,
if we had only the MSM to rely on?
Almost nothing!
And look how the barbarian Basij break any computer, cell phone, or camera!
Of course repression will be the enemy of the new technology.
China shut off the feed, afraid her population was learning too much about proxies!
I follow Nico's ongoing roundup several times a day. It's a must. He is tireless, and the coverage is very helpful, essential, actually.