Bill Maher poignantly joked, "let's be honest ... Twitter didn't save Iran ... Iran saved Twitter."
That statement is more loaded with an absolute truth that will be lost on many of us because the movement is so imperceptable. The gears which turn Mother Necessity away from cable and network news crank and clang so slowly we may not be able to perceive to what horizon they are pointing.
When I was a lad, the entire country gathered around the tube TV to watch one of 3 Network Newscasts that were then available at 6:30PM immediately following a local news cast.
Those were your choices. And for that half hour, only then recently expanded from 15 minutes, right after the dishes were cleared from the table, if you didn't keep your eyes and ears open as your daily ration of whole-grain news was delivered, you missed it and were lucky if someone reported it back to you correctly after dessert. 3 Networks. ABC, CBS and NBC. That was it. Huntley Brinkley, Cronkite, Murrow and Swayze, and a handful of news special programming that airred with a sporadicism that characterized early network TV.
The 24/7 broadcast which first demonstrated the viewer's insatiable appetite for "breaking news" was the assasination of President John Kennedy. It would take another quarter century for news service thinkers to figure out a way to "work it." And like the drug addict that tries to duplicate that first buzz for the rest of his life, the Nets and Cable have spent their histories trying to re-gift that success ever since. If there's a reason to abandon serious reporting and journalism for a no-commericials auto pilot news cast ... they're there before you even get out of bed.
But that's not journalism. There are almost no such things as journalists anymore. Christianne Amanpour is a journalist. Rush Limbaugh calls himself one. Tony Harris, Rick Sanchez, Katy Couric, and Brian Williams seem to know better. And while it's true that many of them came up through the ranks covering Desert Storm and Kosavo, most of them came up through the cafeteria and onward through the copy room and finally to the cozy broadcast chair with hydrolic lift-action and auto-tilt.
But think of it! Back in the early 60s, we had to fit a presidential murder, the Viet Nam war, the killing of Dr. King, the peace movement, and the birth of the labor movement all through 3 tiny peep holes known as "The Nets."
It's been nearly half a century and they've enjoyed a wonderful and profitable success at controlling what we see, what we hear, what we talk about, what we know. What we know.
The only comparable paradigm shift to watching what could be referred to as the beginning of the new revolution in Iran was when Ted Turner convinced us that he could abandon all traces of street beat journalism and simply parrot what comes off of the AP wires day in and day out, and he would call it "Cable" and he would still make us pay for it, and he would still make us sit through more commercials than every commercial you ever watched in the 50s, 60s, and 70s combined.
Now another change happens. Except this one seems to suggest that a reporter, 5 camera operators, 6 sound men, an on-site producer, a director, a switcher, a room full of interns and assistants, a network Boss, and a banquet hall filled with advertisers who dicatate what your years worth of "news" content will be ... have become completely and utterly unnecessary. CNN is conducting what it's calling continuous coverage. But unless you've been at the Jai Lai court all day, you know that the images they're showing you now are old news that surfaced at 5 and 6 oclock this morning and we've already seen them, and conducted our own post-news analysis before we even started channel surfing to see who was "covering it." It's not their content. It's not even their story.
Is it possible that the news outlets, beginning with the Nets and leading up to this day when there are more papers, TV feeds, radio broadcasts, podcasts, websites and RFF feeds than you could possibly access in a year, were really only here temporarily, to hold us up until we could learn to communicate with each other about what is happening to us ourselves?
Twitter's not going to be the Tsumani causing earthquake that I may seem to be suggesting they are in this incredibly historic story; the story that begins in the American's collective conscience all the way back to the birth of Nightline and the beginning of Ted Koppel's distinguished career as we waited for 444 days for our citizen hostages to be released by this strange, far off land called "Eye-ran."
But one thing Twitter is ... is a click in the turn of a gear that moves Mother Necessity toward a new invention that means that one man, and one woman can stand alone on a street and see history happening.
And without a teleprompter, or an AP feed, or advertisers, or an anchor, or even a journalist, the whole planet can, if they wish, listen...and watch...and know.