American TV News pretty much decided to sit out the Iranian election but there’s been no shortage of incredible reportage — from both MSM and new media. What struck me most was the role played by people like Andrew Sulivan and Nico Pitney at Huffington Post.
They were not doing original reporting themselves — they were, in effect, sitting in the anchor chair. But this time, instead of calling upon the correspondents of one TV network, they were drawing sources from throughout the internet — mainstream media from around the world, tweets, Iranian websites, blogger analysis etc. It’s raw and we’ll undoubtedly find out eventually that some of it was off-base but so is TV news during moments like this.
A few further thoughts. It may be that the proper distinction is not between old media and new but between media that are entirely visual (TV) and media that can mix text and video. The ability to provide depth when text is an option makes an enormous difference.
Similarly, the most significant difference in style may result not in “objective” vs. “advocacy” but in space-constrained vs. un-constrained. Having worked on big stories for mainstream media in the past, I’ve always been struck by how much more superficial the ultimate reports sounded compared to the nuance I knew the reporter actually had in his or her notebook or brain.
Finally, we should stop pretending that the new media is free-flowing, democratic and lacking in a power structure. There are gatekeepers — Andrew Sulilvan and Huffington Post don’t act as neutral pass-throughs; they’re deciding which reports should go up and which shouldn’t. So far they seem to have done a good job but let’s acknowledge what they are: tremendously powerful anchormen.