Slashdot Mirror
Net: Now Our Most Serious News Medium?
Even heads of state get the significance of the Net these days. So-called "serious" journalists had been dumping every imaginable rumor - that the State Department had blown up, that crop-dusting planes were about to shower us with anthrax live on the air without any filtering or substantiation. It seemed to me that, unlike any previous big story, the Net had become the place where people were going for more accurate information -- including all kinds of content unavailable in most traditional media.
Who would ever have thought that George W. Bush would do his primary fund-raising appeal before Congress and the public by announcing a url: libertyunite.org? Or that British Prime Minister Tony Blair would publish the evidence against Osama Bin-Laden on a government Web site? Bush's advisers grasped the fund-raising potential of the Net, and Blair realized it is a new way to reach the world, including remote, even hostile corners.
The Net was not only the source of heavy traffic to conventional news sites like Cnn.com, Usatoday.com or the Washington Post/New York Times sites. Literally thousands of new sites sprouted information -- there are way too many to list here -- offering information on the tragedy itself and its survivors, working for disaster relief, presenting discussions about the Taliban and Afghanistan, Islam, Arab resentment against the United States.These news sites were a source of clarity and accuracy for many millions of people, puzzled or frightened by alarmist reports on TV and elsewhere. People posted video online from the disaster site, and broke important news online of the plane attacks, the building's collapse, and the rescue. It were these accounts that reported for the first time that planes had had hit the tower, that the towers had fallen, that there there were likely to be few survivors in the rubble. Two sites I saw were devoted to airline passengers stranded in hotel rooms all over the country seeking information on alternative forms of travel. And it was on the Net, on the Onion's terrific site that the first witty, tasteful and necessary media and political spoofs of the response to the tragedy were pulled off.
Many more sites devoted themselves to personal testimony: from people who saw the disaster, who were sending e-mail news dispatches to friends, who sought to clarify rumors or post accounts, who needed to discuss how they felt about the new "war."
Transcripts of 911 calls from the World Trade Center are posted online, as are the transcripts of reports by Islamic and Arab TV news organizations. This new kind of personal reporting offers an invaluable archive of a global tragedy. In the understandable patriotic frenzy that followed the attacks, it was on the Net that dissenters, peace activists and privacy advocates first surfaced, not the mainstream media. The Net has thus become a bulwark against the one dimensional view of events and the world that characterize Big Media. All points of view appeared, and instantly.
This kind of in-depth discussion and information was rarely available in conventional media -- on CNN and other sites, activists in Arab nations directly debated and talked with Americans, for example, something never before possible in media, which has neither the air time, space, resources, or inclination. Newspapers publish much too infrequently to compete seriously for long on a breaking story like this, with either TV or the Net. (An exception: localized cases like New York or Washington, where coverage in daily papers, particularly the New York Times and The Washington Post, was important and thorough).
Big media, already fragmenting, appears to be dividing this way:
- Commercial TV is a medium of images and entertainment. Nobody, certainly not the Net at this point, can compete with TV's ability to present powerful imagery live, from the plane attacks to speeches before Congress to Ground Zero to the aftermath to global reaction and soon, military conflict. In fact, TV arguably transmits powerful images too often and for too long, creating an emotional, almost hysterical climate around big stories even when there?s no news to report.
- Cable TV is the medium of political argument and confrontation. Channels like Fox, CNN and MSNBC are institutional media, the place where politicians and lobbyists gather to press their viewpoints, talk indirectly with other leaders elsewhere, share insider information and float options and ideas. These media are striking in their overwhelming tilt towards officials, bureaucrats, lobbyists, politicians and academics. You can watch them for days and not hear from average people, beyond the silly handful of calls or e-mails they occasionally cite.
- The Net offers not only breaking news -- mainstream media companies all have sophisticated websites -- but is the medium of individual expression and additional, more in depth information. Instant message systems played a crucial role in transmitting information, both accurate and false, especially in and near the disaster sites. IM will almost surely become a dominant and significant information source in the future, especially as it moves beyond college campuses and networked companies.
But for all the mainstream media phobias about the dangerous or irresponsible Net, it's seemed increasingly clear in the weeks since the attacks that the Net has become our most serious medium, the only one that offers information consumers breaking news and discussions, alternative points of view. Sadly, the Net seems to be the favored medium of the terrorists who planned the attacks as well. (Countless sites sprung up to detail what Islam is really about, and how diverse opinions in the Arab world are at play in this disaster).
It's the medium of personal expression -- people e-mailed friends and relatives to tell them they were okay, to get relief information, to volunteer time and money. And, of course, unlike conventional media, which still give ordinary citizens little or no opportunity to participate, the Net is architecturally and viscerally interactive. Feedback and individual opinion are not ghettoized in op-ed pages or in a handful of "we-want-to-hear-from-you" (no, they don't) phone calls, but are an integral part of Net information dispersal, it's core.
The Net has had its ups and downs in recent months. It's still beset by intrusive regulators, eager law enforcement officials and greedy dot.com entrepreneurs and corporate interests who want its profits but not its values. It's still going through a shaky phase economically. But the WTC attacks remind us of the extraordinary openness, open distribution of information and sense of community-building that are the heart of the wired world's promise.
... because most people were stuck at their desks and had no radio nearby (or was disruptive to other employees). Once we got a a TV in a conference room, people dropped the net for TV. You see, the net can be hacked, and articles found on the net (unless they are from reliable news sources, a la cnn, ap, reuters) aren't very trusted. TV is still the most reliable and trusted media.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
What about the fact that every major news site in the U.S. and Canada collapsed under the load of Sept. 11? It was several hours before CNN was back up, and then in a bandwidth-limited form. I got most of my info from the BBC and Australian sites, and even those were very heavily loaded. Meanwhile, anywhere that there was a TV on Sept. 11 was tuned to CNN, which provided the breaking news as it happened -- and since that date, the principals have all appeared on television to describe their positions, not the internet. It seems premature to proclaim a new era of Internet news reporting.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I think the fact that so many folks went to CNN shows a weakness in the current people model...
As a "cyber-journalist" I suppose it is understandable that you laud the WWW as the great new thing (TM)... But mainstream WWW sites were totally unreachable (Slashdot was an exception, but most people don't know slashdot, they know msnbc.com and abcnews.com). I would argue that the real landmark was email, which came through and proved its worth that day. When the phone systems collapsed thousands, if not millions of people frantically got in touch with loved ones to inform them of their safety via email (after 4 hours of "circuit not available" messages, I eventually contacted both my sister and my cousin this way).
If something is printed in the New York Times, or broadcast on CNN, it is much more likely to pass without critical evaluation than something that is posted on the web. "I saw it on the web" is almost a synonym for "it may be true; I want to get more data, cross check some facts." To my mind, that is a very valuable for new media in a free society, especially one that intends to stay free.
-- MarkusQ
Once I could get my hands on CNN Television, I didn't even go near my computer the rest of the day.. Almost the whole week. :-) It was near impossible to get information from any of the major news sites during the crisis..
.. I think I'll stick to television.
And, I wouldn't say the net is full of good information either. Things I've heard that are complete crap from the net in the past month:
Arab man tells girlfriend not to go to malls on Halloween. Nope.
Go outside and light a candle - we're gunna be photographed by satellites! Nope.
Nostradamous predicted all of this! The end is near! Morons.
Clear Channel Communications banned playing certain songs (LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOR, w00t!) on the radio.. Not quite.
Yea, if I want respectable news coverage, I'd sure as hell go to the net. FULL OF IT. When the neighbor lady down the street who starts rumors like these gets exposure to millions of readers, emm,
First, there were the obvious technical problems. Yahoo was dead in the water for the entire morning of September 11. Ditto for CNN and MSNBC. There were smaller sites reporting on things--mostly weblogs--but they were reporting by watching TV, listening to the radio, and typing what they saw and heard. So the net was a secondary news source in this case. People were only using the web because they were at work and didn't have access to other media.
Second, the independent sites were not doing any better than TV in general. We make fun of TV for jumping the gun too quickly and reporting unconfirmed information, but the weblogs were much worse about this. Dave Winer started beating the war drum right away at scripting.com, putting up scare-tactic surverys like "Will America go to war?" within hours of the attacks. Metafilter.com ran a whole bunch of really dumb stories that never would have made it to TV, like the Nostradamus nonsense, and the headline about a small, unmarked plane circling Manhattan. Were they trying to get people to think it was another terrorist-controlled plane? In reality, it was a FEMA plane surveying the damage.
In general, the weblogs and independent web sites have been too quick to pat themselves on the back about September 11.
This is not quite true. Take, for example, Salon. A number of people may be upset that they've started charging for quite a bit of their content now, but the fact remains that they have some of the best coverage that I've seen of recent events.
-Henri
P.S. I'm impressed that Salon made it so long without charging. They still make *half* of their money from ads. That's pretty impressive.
Today's Fox News: "The Internet, they tell us, is a domain of hype and hoaxes, while traditional media can be trusted to check things out and get them right. Yet if one looks at Amazon.Com's reviews of Arming America, it is immediately evident that Amazon reviewers found the problems with Bellesiles' book a year ago, while the establishment was still smitten."
I think I'm experiencing Deja Vu, because I coulda sworn I've read this article before (Ok, bored with searching, but there is more).
We get it, Jon. The net is evolving to the next stage of media. Can we talk about something else?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
This is just more hype about how the Net and everything appearing on it is cool and hip and important, while the dinosaur of old media is dying. It's still not true.
My main use for the Internet on September 11 was communications. I don't have a television or a radio in my office at work, so what I did was SSH into my tv-card-equipped machine at home and fire up XawTV and view screen grabs from ABC and CNN. I was on the CNN.com IRC server reading their closed-captioning server so I had a basically real time transcript to go with the pictures. I was also on EFNet talking to people. The Net allowed me to circumvent the physical barriers blocking my access to non-Net-based information, but I was still getting my news from traditional sources. Most Web-based news sites were terribly behind the curve; those that weren't were overloaded and unreachable.
As for reporting since September 11, the Net isn't that great. The only sites that are terribly informative are ones run by big media outlets. It's true that the Net allows you a much wider perspective, since you can get news from all over the world. But it's not the chaotic rumor mongering and pontification of most independent web sites which is interesting; it's the well researched and disciplined reporting that happens at major media organizations.
You argue that old media is monolithic and overly consolidated. But the Web allows you to get around that easily. It's not the independent news sites that allow this; it's the fact that every major news organization on the planet has a presence on the Web. Don't believe the New York Times? See what the South China Morning Post has to say instead.
The problem, Jon, is that you seem to believe that just because something is on the Net, it's automatically great. But most people who write on the Web aren't particularly skillful or talented or well informed; they're just people. You still need money and resources to gather news effectively. CNN and ABC News and whatnot may not be as hip and cool as LeetNews.com, but they have the resources to do the "serious" reporting. The Net is great because it makes more of this sort of information available, more quickly. But it doesn't empower anyone to suddenly become well informed and interesting.
ABCNews.com and cnn.com are our most important sources of information online
I would have to disagree. Many of the most respected staff at CNN news have left with the AOL takeover. ABCNews has really had the screws put to it by Disney.
Byte for byte, I'd have to say that MSNBC and CBSNEWS give you the best news for the bandwidth. MSNBC (yes, I know, I don't like the MS part either) has the combined power of NBC News and the Washington Post/Newsweek behind it. You can see it with the breadth and depth of their articles.
CBSNEWS, on the other hand, is among the most respected in the industry for integrity and balanced reporting.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Wash DC TV reported for several hours rumours of bombings at State Dept and other sites that were FALSE.
National TV showed virtually NO pictures of the "celebrations" in Gaza, West Bank, and other locations. And since there were no pictures, they didn't discuss WHY videos had been supressed. (Or why they're being surpressed again by the Palestinian Authority)
Consider this: How many times have you watched TV coverage of a subject you know and understand and you find yourself thinking "they're getting it wrong, that's false, they're missing it,..."?
Now think about their coverage of things you know little to nothing about.
Mass Market TV exists to sell airtime to advertisers based on estimates of the number viewers and their demographics. The news departments are under great pressure to attract viewers and their coverage reflects this. (Even small things like leaving the weather until almost the end of the 10:00 or 11:00 PM news shows.)
IF you are prepared to do your own digging and think about what you read, the Net is FAR superior to TV news. Especially for stories that require some background, require thinking about details, or lack captivating images.
Milk may or not be all that good for adult people. You may have been coopted by the dairy industry. Check out http://www.notmilk.com/ or pick up a copy of Diet for a New America.
Notice that 1) I have directed you towards a website 2) that undermines big business 3) and offer an alternative that is actually a book (the big picture).
Television does none of these things very well. And milk is bad for you.
Milk is not better for you than Coke, because, from an evolutionary standpoint, mammals have internal mechanisms that prevent them from properly digesting lactose after they are a certain age. It's a natural weaning process. This is discussed in most evolution/natural science college classes. The reason 30% of our population is able to digest milk is that that percentage of the population had ancestors in northern Europe who were goat herders -- those ancestors needed to be able to digest milk at any time. Yes, almost all of the people who are able to digest lots of milk at any age are white and originally from Europe.
The milk commercials, however, neglect to tell people this, and instead label the vast majority of our population "lactose intolerant", like it's some kind of disease or something. (They even sell a "cure" in the form of Lactaid and other pills!) Americans/Europeans also don't often realize that sending milk in CARE packages to other countries makes people sick more often than not.
I know this is a little offtopic, but it's an important fact that most people don't realize, and the brainwashing of those damned milk commercials doesn't help. I would also like to state that I agree with the poster's main point. The commercials for milk even prove it: TV sells you what you want to hear and not necessarily what is the truth.
I've had MSNBC andCNN on pretty constantly during the day when I'm wokring, and I've heard a LOT of things that I cannot corroborate with the Internet resources, even for MSNBC, FoxNews and CNN.
I heard 3 or 4 times today on the TV that they busted 3 Pakistani men at the Hudson Valley Water Treatment Plant. I can't find any mention of it on the net from any major news outlet.
I heard of a couple of hijackings on the TV yesterday that I've seen nowhere on the web.
With telelvision, they have talking heads sitting there live, and if information comes in it is handed to them and read on the air. The websites seem to be far slower to update.
As far as long-term information goes, however, there is nothing like the internet. I have been able to study the history of Saudi Arabia, Israel, Afghanistan, Oman and the foreign relations between all of them and the US. A couple of web searches, and you've got historical information.
I wish more Americans would stop obsessing over knowing *exactly* what the military is up to at the moment and start concentrating on why we have troops there in the first place. As a nation we are rather uninformed on what's going on over there. Yes, we are more informed than many other nations, but we also meddle more than most of those nations.
Look at the information you're seeing, and if you were old enough to be media-literate during the Gulf War, think about how the messages were managed then, including coverage on TV, news wire services, editorials, interviews with government sources. It was done better during the Gulf War because Bush Sr. could take his time, while Bush Jr. had this thrown at him, plus the press has a strong talent for going for the emotional, intense stories around the WTC scene, which creates an energy that Bush can use but can't control as easily.
Email was more useful than the web for the beginnings of the story - I first heard by phone call from a friend who'd been watching early-morning TV, and then started getting emails. CNN.com was slashdotted, and did extremely well getting anything at all up and running with that demand load - just because the web lets everybody publish information to everybody else doesn't mean you don't turn to a few centralized sites for breaking news :-) Email also had the advantage that it's much lower bit volume and scales better than the web because of the large peer-to-peer connectivity, and it has different failure modes than wired and wireless telephony so people near the affected sites could get messages out more reliably.
The net being what it is, I googled for Esther Dyson conspiracy propaganda and found a bunch of references including this interview with Esther Dyson:
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
i am from NJ, right outside NYC about 10 minutes from ground zero. I was in Cali 9/11. My wife called me hysterical and woke me up. We spoke for a short while and got cut off. I could not reach her by phone. I got to the office, hooked into the network and she had her IM client up. We were able to talk all that day thanks to it. We had a radio in the office and I listened to NPR while she watched CNN. We both scanned the net for news too. For news, I used every source I could get - none stood out. But the net let me keep a constant instant watch over my family from 3000 miles away and that was cool.
we speak the way we breath --Fugazi
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
It is YOU who fell for a hoax.
Reuters Responds to Allegations Regarding Videotape from East Jerusalem, 11 September 2001.
Reuters rejects as utterly baseless an allegation being circulated by e-mail and the internet claiming that it circulated 10-year-old videotape to illustrate Palestinians celebrating in the wake of the September 11 tragedies in the United States.
It also dismisses as completely unfounded later suggestions that its cameraman instigated or in any way encouraged the demonstration.
The videotape in question was shot in East Jerusalem by Reuters on September 11 in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the United States. The footage was broadcast by CNN and other subscribers to the Reuters video news service.
Reuters is not in the business of falsifying the news. The public demonstration of support for the attacks was already under way when our cameraman and other media arrived on the scene.
Reuters welcomes the following statement by the Universidad Estatal de Campinas-Brasil (UNICAMP), one of whose students was the author of the original e-mail questioning the authenticity of the footage, setting the record straight
UNICAMP would like to announce that it has no knowledge of a videotape from 1991, whose images supposedly aired on CNN showing Palestinians celebrating the terrorist attacks in the U.S. The tape was supposedly from 1991, and there were rumors that the images were passed off as current.
This information was later denied, as soon as it proved false, by Márcio A. V. Carvalho, a student at UNICAMP. He approached the administration on the 17.09.2001 to clarify the following:
the information he got, verbally, was that a professor from another institution (not from UNICAMP) had the tape;
he sent the information to a discussion group email list;
many people from this list were interested in the subject and requested more details;
he again contacted the person who first gave him the information and the person denied having the tape;
the student immediately sent out a note clarifying what happened to the people from his email list.
The original message, however, was distributed all over the world, often with many distortions, including a falsified by-line article from the student. He affirms that a hacker attacked his domain. Several E-mails have been sent on his behalf and those dating from 15.09.2001 should be ignored.
Among the distortions is the fact that UNICAMP would be analyzing the tape, which is absolutely false. The administration considers this alert definitive and will be careful to avoid new rumors.