Who Are the Actual Democrats?

MICHAEL TOMASKY, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

Twitter & Social Media: At Front Lines, Bearing Witness in Real Time



                         Credit Mauricio Lima for The New York Times        

DAVID CARR, N.Y. TIMES

My social media feed has taken a bloody turn in the last few weeks, and I’m hardly alone. Along with the usual Twitter wisecracking and comments on incremental news, I have seen bodies scattered across fields and hospitals in Ukraine and Gaza. I have read posts from reporters who felt threatened, horrified and revolted.

Geopolitics and the ubiquity of social media have made the world a smaller, seemingly gorier place. If Vietnam brought war into the living room, the last few weeks have put it at our fingertips. On our phones, news alerts full of body counts bubble into our inbox, Facebook feeds are populated by appeals for help or action on behalf of victims, while Twitter boils with up-to-the-second reporting, some by professionals and some by citizens, from scenes of disaster and chaos.

For most of recorded history, we have witnessed war in the rearview mirror. It took weeks and sometimes months for Mathew Brady’s, and his associates’, photos of the bloody consequences of Antietam to reach the public. And while the invention of the telegraph might have let the public know what side was in ascent, images that brought a remote war home frequently lagged.

   

Ayman Mohyeldin, left, an NBC reporter, at a Gaza hospital. He posted on Twitter about an Israeli strike that killed four boys. Credit NBC News       

Then came radio reports in World War II, with the sounds of bombs in the background, closing the distance between men who fought wars and those for whom they were fighting. Vietnam was the first war to leak into many American living rooms, albeit delayed by the limits of television technology at the time. CNN put all viewers on a kind of war footing, with its live broadcasts from the first gulf war in 1991.

But in the current news ecosystem, we don’t have to wait for the stentorian anchor to arrive and set up shop. Even as some traditional media organizations have pulled back, new players like Vice and BuzzFeed have stepped in to sometimes remarkable effect.

Citizen reports from the scene are quickly augmented by journalists. And those journalists on the ground begin writing about what they see, often via Twitter, before consulting with headquarters about what it all means.

 

Bearing witness is the oldest and perhaps most valuable tool in the journalist’s arsenal, but it becomes something different delivered in the crucible of real time, without pause for reflection. It is unedited, distributed rapidly and globally, and immediately responded to by the people formerly known as the audience.

It has made for a more visceral, more emotional approach to reporting. War correspondents arriving in a hot zone now provide an on-the-spot moral and physical inventory that seems different from times past. That emotional content, so noticeable when Anderson Cooper was reporting from the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, has now become routine, part of the real-time picture all over the web.

The absence of the conventional layers of journalism — correspondents filing reports that are then edited for taste and accuracy — has put several journalists under scrutiny, mostly for responding in the moment to what they saw in front of them.

 

A reporter from The Wall Street Journal wondered on Twitter what the patients at a Gaza hospital thought of Hamas’s leadership setting up shop in the same location. Ayman Mohyeldin, an NBC News correspondent, was purportedly pulled out of Gaza after posting on Twitter about an Israeli strike that killed four Palestinian boys, accompanied by the hashtag #horror.

 

 

 

Diana Magnay of CNN found herself reassigned to Moscow after she complained on Twitter that she was being threatened by Israelis who were watching the attacks on Gaza from a hill in Israel, calling them “scum.”

And it’s not just a one-way broadcast. Ms. Magnay’s name-calling caused an immediate uproar on the Internet. A Sky News reporter, Colin Brazier, was upbraided on Twitter after going through the belongings of the victims of the downed aircraft in Ukraine during a live shot. He promptly apologized. And after removing Mr. Mohyeldin from Gaza, NBC News was widely criticized on social media, including by many journalists, and it is worth noting that he was reinstated to the assignment. The megaphone goes both ways.

 

MH17: Sky News reporter Colin Brazier reports from the crash scene. Photograph: Sky News

 

The public has developed an expectation that it will know exactly what a reporter knows every single second, and news organizations are increasingly urging their correspondents to use social media to tell their stories — and to extend their brand. (Unless the reporter says something dumb. Then, not so much.)

 

Anne Barnard, a reporter for The New York Times covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was criticized on Twitter for ... not tweeting. She sees journalistic value in the short-form text service. Interviewed on NPR, Ms. Barnard said: “I think over all it brings more benefits than problems. I think we just — again, we have to remember our primary work is the reporting we’re doing on the ground. You know, our job isn’t to tweet in real time.”

Twitter’s ability to carry visual information has made it an even more important part of the news narrative. A message may be only 140 characters, but we all know a picture is worth many, many words.

Often, it is a single image that comes to represent big, complicated events. The children fleeing napalm in Vietnam, an incinerated soldier along a “highway of death” during the gulf war or the hooded prisoner standing on a box in Abu Ghraib.

 

Barbie Zelizer, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, says social media has not fundamentally altered the vocabulary of war.

“It is a difference of degree, not of kind,” she said. “There are more pictures more frequently from more people, but they still serve the same purpose, which is to give us a glimpse, a window, into conflict.”

But we no longer have to wait for those moments.

 

Tyler Hicks, a longtime photographer for The Times, was at a hotel in Gaza City across from the beach where the four Palestinian boys died. He tweeted the news immediately, took a photo that was hard to glance at and then wrote about what it was like to be standing there.

 

The aftermath of an airstrike on a beach in Gaza City on Wednesday. Four young Palestinian boys, all cousins, were killed. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times        

 

He said that he felt horrified, but that in a clinical sense he also felt exposed. “If children are being killed, what is there to protect me, or anyone else?”

The act of witness, a foundation of war reporting, has been democratized and disseminated in new ways. The same device that carries photos of your mother’s new puppy or hosts aimless video games also serves up news from the front.

Many of us cannot help looking because of what Susan Sontag has called “the perennial seductiveness of war.” It is a kind of rubbernecking, staring at the bloody aftermath of something that is not an act of God but of man. The effect, as Ms. Sontag pointed out in an essay in The New Yorker in 2002, is anything but certain.

“Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to ‘care’ more,” she wrote. “It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local, political intervention.”

 

A Gaza beach moments after two explosions on Wednesday killed four boys playing there and leveled a shack. The Israel Defense Forces acknowledged that it was responsible for the “tragic outcome” and said the attack was aimed at Hamas. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times        

 

So now that war comes to us in real time, do we feel helpless or empowered? Do we care more, or will the ubiquity of images and information desensitize us to the point where human suffering loses meaning when it is part of a scroll that includes a video of your niece twerking? Oh, we say as our index finger navigates to the next item, another one of those. 

HOW TWITTER CHANGED POLITICS AND POLITICAL JOURNALISM

Twitter Inc stock information is seen on a display at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, New York, USA 07 November 2013. Shares in the company Twitter (TWTR) [were offered]on the NYSE at a price of 26 US Dollars, at the start of Twitter’s highly anticipated initial public offering. At the end of the day it traded at $44.90


CHRIS CILLIZZA WASHINGTON POST

Twitter is now a publicly traded stock. But long before any Tom, Dick or Harry (or Ron) could buy stock in Twitter, the micro-blogging service was in the process of fundamentally reshaping the way in which politics is practiced and covered. The changes, which are still in process, are profound — in the way that politicians interact (or don’t) with reporters, the life cycle of news cycles and how the general public gets (or doesn’t) its information.



CNN’s Peter Hamby [above] has done what we take to be the definitive work in this space in a paper entitled “Did Twitter kill the Boys on the Bus?” that he wrote during a semester as a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Hamby’s paper runs 95 pages. You should read the whole thing, but in the event you don’t, here are the key quotes from it as well as a few of our own thoughts.

* “It’s become the new conventional wisdom setter, and that conventional wisdom gets amplified as well, because you have editors sitting in bureaus watching this stuff. When everything is in 140 characters, it gives a skewed version of reality, and that impacts how editors think about what reporters should be covering, and it impacts what reporters think is  important.”
That quote, from Associated Press political editor Liz Sidoti, is a telling one.  As WaPo’s Dan Balz noted in his terrific campaign book “Collision 2012,” the conventional wisdom surrounding any political event — particularly presidential debates — was set by Twitter even as the event was happening. By the time the debate ended, political Twitter had rendered its judgment on who won, who lost and why. There’s no question that political Twitter reinforces a sort of groupthink — since everyone in the D.C. bubble is following everyone else 0n Twitter; it’s an electronic echo chamber.  And that echo chamber often forgets that just 8 percent of the public gets its news from Twitter and only 16 percent of the public uses Twitter at all.



* “No offense to CNN.com, there is a lot of traffic there, but I can go to Robert Costa and I can take his link off The Corner on the National Review and I can generate as much news out of The Corner. Now with Twitter, you can make your own news and put it up on your Twitter feed.”
This is a quote from an anonymous staffer for Mitt Romney’s campaign — and gets at the new realities of how, why and to whom political operatives dole out their information. Twenty years ago, a campaign would need to go through one of the broadcast networks or places like the New York Times, Washington Post or Wall Street Journal to get major coverage for a story. The onset of the Internet changed that, allowing political operatives to use smaller news outlets and, eventually, partisan news outlets to push stories into the public arena. Matt Rhoades, who managed Romney’s 2012 campaign, grasped that changed reality far earlier than most. (“A link is a link,” he told Hamby. “I’ve said this a million times. I used to say it going back to, like, 2004.”) The emergence of Twitter altered the calculus of how to disseminate information even further. Now, a good tidbit leaked to someone with a strong social media following in the political world could immediately become a “thing” — no matter whether the tweeter was affiliated with a particular news outlet or no news outlet at all.

* “Reporters, [Rhoades] saw, seemed to care about self-promotion, clicks and buzz as much as the journalism they were supposed to be practicing.”
In an era where everyone is a “brand,” the danger is that the brand becomes more important than the journalism. There’s no question that Twitter has fed the already-rampant navel-gazing tendencies of political reporters. We can’t even count the number of conversations — many of which we start — that center around this basic sentence: “Did you see what fill-in-the-blank-person tweeted? I am going to retweet it.” (It reads even worse than it sounds!) Like with all good things, there is such a thing as too much Twitter.

* “It started to feel like with Twitter you had to chase every little thing. Sometimes, all the editor sitting in front of the computer screen knows is that this tweet just came past their eyes and they want you to match that. And all your time is spent racing toward nothing.”
That quote comes from Ashley Parker of the New York Times. (Fun fact: Ashley’s Twitter handle reads “I remain skeptical about Twitter.”) And it speaks to the fact that Twitter has made the difference between mountains and molehills in the context of a political campaign virtually indistinguishable. EVERYTHING is seen as a big deal — worthy of analysis. (Yes, the Fix is as guilty as analyzing things to death as the next blogger.)  That mountains=molehills mentality means that readers/users/viewers often have trouble distinguishing the major from the mundane. Here’s the problem from a reporter’s perspective: There’s almost always no way of really knowing what molehills might become mountains in an hour, a day or a week. Because of that reality, you have to monitor everything in the event that what looks like a small deal becomes a big deal. That’s nothing new in journalism, but what Twitter has done is exponentially increase the number of small things you need to watch.