It’s no wonder that mainstream media is losing it’s grasp as a source for news. Frank Gray proved that today in his column, “Twitter on edge of useless.”
People didn’t research issues. Voters relied on what came to be called sound bites – 10-, 15-second quotes tossed out by officeholders or candidates. The contents of these sparse lines were all that much of the public knew about important issues, and they were what they used to form opinions.
Politicians learned quickly that the less they said the better. There was more to be gained from a glib sound bite than from a careful explanation of an issue or position. In fact, sound bites became the only kind of information offered in some venues. It had come to the point where a comic book was too much for our limited attention spans.
Now, even the 15-second sound bite is going by the wayside. People are on Twitter, sending out little messages to anyone willing to listen, messages that can’t have more than 140 characters, maybe 25 words. The big difference is that the tweet is even more inane.
It’s attitudes like this, that are making publications like the Journal Gazette inane.
Even politicians are using it, sending out 140-character messages to the faithful. Now, even the sound bite takes too long. If something can’t be explained within 140 letters, we aren’t interested.
Before long, I began to fret, we’re going to become a nation whose beliefs, values and philosophies are formed by a flood of 20-word posts, many based on rumor.
There he goes. The Internet is nothing but a bunch of rumor mongers and conspiracy nuts spreading lies.
But I checked into it, and I’ve discovered that Twitter isn’t total nonsense. As one person pointed out in a column I read, tweeting was one of the few ways, if not the only way, that information got out of Iran during the protests after the disputed elections there.
Twitter can actually be used for, say, newspapers to gather tidbits of information from large numbers of people after disasters, using the little pieces to paint a larger picture. Reporters can use it to send individual facts to editors from news scenes.
OK, I conceded, it isn’t useless.
Just mostly useless.
Twitter and Facebook provided the MSM with their only lens inside of Iran. Without it, MSM would have proven useless during the uprising.
The fact is, the Journal Gazette isn’t useless. I use the free copy they stuff in my paperbox for shipping paper and wrapping fish.
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Funny how he, as one of those ‘sacred’ reporters, does not take any responsibility for his role in creating, satisfying or driving the public’s demand for the ‘glib’ soundbites!
If believe that his general premise is that a lot of people over-rely on superficial bits of information to form their opinions, and that is something I fully agree with. Although the soundbite is usefull at times, it can never substitue for substantive research on a subject.
However, I should point out that it was Gray’s own newspaper that in 2007 urged voters to not let their disapproval of Councilman Crawford’s past voting record guide them in their upcoming vote. They said that the past was the past, and our vote this year should only be based upon how we think Crawford would vote in the future. The same article then went on to suggest that we vote against Councilman Shaoff because of his past voting record.
As I recall, that article was substantially longer than a twit or even an average blog post. Yet it proved definitively that length of words alone does not necessarily equate with substance. On a daily basis, the Journal Gazette probably prints as many words as all the local blogs combined, but a lot of it is worthless opinion and inuendo. Pare out the crap, and you might be lucky to end up with the equivilant of a few good blog posts.
That’s my jab at the J.G., and here’s my personal take on Frank Gray. He once did an article about the drug activity in my neighborhood. During our interview, I made it very clear that the police held a lot of responsibility for this problem, yet he totally neglected to mention that. The article looked good to all who read it, but for what was left out, it was actually very superficial.
Number of words doesn’t alway correlate with the strength of the idea.