In my last post I alluded to the fact that the Internet was more responsive and had more facts at hand than the Administration or FEMA seemed to have for several days. There’s a lesson in there, I think.
While the President and his cronies openly loot the nation in an astonishing display of venality, funneling vast sums of taxpayer monies to the favored few, there is a whisper that is rapidly becoming a conversation that will soon become a roar.
There are a million eyes watching and reporting these stories from a million perspectives, and the truth of what goes on behind “closed doors” in the halls of power becomes opened to the light by the sheer number of observations that occur, are written about, and commented on. The millions of people that do this are not motivated by money, but by an instinctive search for the truth, because what they see and what they hear in the “official” media rings false.
Yes, there are are a few sites that offer some pretty far-out theories, but if you sift all the conversations, recurring threads become pretty obvious. People are getting tired of having their news fed spoon-fed by spinmeisters pushing their ‘talking points’ du jour. Look at the ratings for the major networks- they are getting lower and lower, and the networks are panicking- witness special “news” stories that are saved for ‘sweeps weeks’. All to push up ratings- which are still sinking. What the media can’t seem to grasp is that many of us in the ‘real world’ are cynical and jaded enough to see through all the folderol, and ask, in the immortal words of Clara Peller, “Where’s the Beef?”
One of the interesting phenomena of modern times is that technology+ people will naturally rush in to fill any sociological vacuum that occurs. The Internet is the tool that enables this phenomenon- and people are starting to use it to fill the gap the media leaves behind, and will leave the media behind in the process. I didn’t watch much television, either local or national, during Katrina and the aftermath. I didn’t need to, when I had my own reporters who were living in a building on Poydras street in New Orleans right through the storm, and giving me a live webcam on the action, and a live, unedited, blow-by-blow account on internet relay chat.
I had comprehensive reports from a dozen Livejournals of people who were on the ground in the cities and towns affected as rescuers, or residents who made it away in the first few days. The fact that their hosting wasn’t affected by the storm meant that as soon as they got an Internet connection, or could text-message someone who had one and would relay it, it was posted and I could read it in almost real time.
What I began to notice, repeatedly, is that even CNN and Fox and MSNBC were getting farther and farther behind the various credible sources I found on the Internet- and the disparity only grew. I read about the levee break almost immediately after it happened- it was still a couple of hours before I saw it on television. While CNN was proclaiming 59 dead in New Orleans, the number of bodies actually counted by witnesses on the ground was far more- by an order of magnitude.
I understand CNN’s (or any network news team, I’m picking on CNN because thats what I check most often) need to have facts checked. I applaud them for that, but their process is flawed in a day and age when people can get their own news firsthand and in real time. It’s disheartening to think of what they report on when, in a fast-moving situation, a random 51-year-old guy with a laptop can get faster and more accurate information that they can present on the air- and very little of the information I got on the Internet was incorrect- I’d have to say a vanishingly small amount.
Because of the Internet, I could watch live feed from local stations in the affected area- I watched the anchors on WWL-TV do an heroic job in a borrowed studio, on air almost beyond human endurance- ties and jackets forgotten, working hard to bring an immense story to the few who had power to see it- and to the millions of us who tuned in to live feed reflectors that were set up almost as soon as they were on the air. I saw the Mayor Nagin’s impassioned pleas live and uncut.
And I wasn’t alone- thousands of threads on hundreds of discussion boards told me of what others were seeing or hearing, providing me with links that pointed me to new sources, and let me hear other people’s opinions and theories- as fast as they could type them, with only a modicum of critical thinking required on my part to separate chaff from the grain. You see, if you make a statement of fact in a public chatroom or webpage, you better be sure that you’re right, because someone, or more than one someone, will be checking you out and calling you out. It’s a self-correcting system.
All this brings me back to the point I was trying to make- openness is being forced on the politicians and government whether they like it or not. The unbelievable arrogance of the current Administration speaks loudly to the fact that they have yet to get onto the cluetrain. And it may, just may, bring them down.