Marchbooks' Blog

June 21, 2009

Twitter on the Evening News by Janus Kane

Filed under: In the News — marchbooks @ 8:22 pm
Tags: , ,

I enjoy Twitter. It is a great resource and I have met some interesting people there. Without question, Twitter has found a place in today’s society. Having said that, I have to ask – am I the only one who is a bit concerned at the fact that television news seems to be doing some of their story research on Twitter?

I am not talking about the constant references to Twitter as a social networking site. No, what I’m referring to is the actual citing of Twitter Tweets as news. I was stunned to see the evening news, last night, reference the Tweets of opposing parties in their report of the Tehran conflict. Seriously, is this what news reporting in our country has come to?

For some time now, news disseminators  have been getting their story ideas from the Internet, but now it seems that they are getting the story itself there. Has the Internet become one-stop-shopping for reporters? Will television and newspaper reporting agencies now be satisfied with regurgitating the same information we can find on our laptops?

I think my biggest problem with this, besides the duplicity of it, is the question of credibility. How easily could a twitter account, or many other Internet sources for that matter, be pirated, hacked or just plain manipulated to provide false information. Call me crazy, but when I tune into the nightly ‘news’ I would at least like to preserve the illusion that the stories I am hearing about have been researched and verified by a news reporting agency that I can trust.

I realize that news reporting, like so many things in today’s society, must change in the face of the Internet age. This change, however, does not seem to be progress.

The Little Insanity

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