Tag Archives: Iran

Twitter is democratizing nothing

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Tweetgasm. Photo: CC/Roland Harvey

Tweetgasm. Photo: CC/Roland Harvey

Hey, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy Buzzflash. But I did do a search of tweets hashtagged, #iranelection, as this columnist, below, suggested.

And, you know what I found?

Tweets of mainstream news stories,  retweets of those tweets, and tweets of Alex Jones’ coverage, which itself is sourced from the MSM.

And shame on Andrew Sullivan for patting himself on the back, with a reader’s message–citing Sullivan’s tweet pickups–that “the revolution is on” in American media.

It simply isn’t.

This is a repeat of the Mumbai massacre/Twitter story. Remember that? Turned out that was complete bullshit, too.

Here’s a bit from the Buzzflash columnist’s tweetgasm:

This is an historical turning point in journalism. Hundreds of users Twitter on this subject every minute and release news of deaths, rallies, protests, and everything in between. A simple search of #iranelection on Twitter will provide each post with that tag, where most, if not all, the breaking news is occurring and Iranians are communicating.

via How Twitter Democratized a Dictatorship | BuzzFlash.org.

Meanwhile, Iranians, no doubt prompted to some degree by U.S. intelligence forces, are spilling their blood for a hopeless cause.

Mideast muscle flex looks phony

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(null)
Not much of a confrontation, after all.


Even Fox News smelled something fishy about the U.S. Pentagon’s very clearly altered video of the recent chest puffing exercise in the Strait of Hormuz.

But all of the mainstream media (including CNN, depicted above) are letting this slip, as if they’d learned nothing since the U.S.-led Iraq invasion. If they do it again (I suspect the Hormuz bit was a Pentagon trial balloon to check its media play), it will be fair to call the MSM complicit in a deception meant to garner public support for invading Iran.

More from here:

POLITICS-US: Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel

Despite Cosgriff’s account, which contradicted earlier Pentagon portrayals of the incident as a confrontation, not a single news outlet modified its earlier characterisation of the incident. After the Cosgriff briefing, Associated Press carried a story that said, ” U.S. forces were taking steps toward firing on the Iranians to defend themselves, said the U.S. naval commander in the region. But the boats — believed to be from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s navy — turned and moved away, officials said.”