We have posted previously about the excitement drawn from following a state legislator while voting on the house floor during a weekend session as deadlines loomed. Since then, we’ve been made aware of this section of SourceWatch - Your guide to the names behind the news that collects links and information about government tweeting. From there we’ve found the Capital Tweets widget by the Sunlight Foundation that funnels tweets to your website from all 80ish Congressmen who tweet. The site govtwit.com lets you search for your local and state politicians who are tweeting.
… two articles published recently at the Atlantic.com. The first chronicles the fall of the newsweekly including the likes of US News and World Report, Time, and Newsweek (The Economist, however, seems to be thriving). This sentence seems especially poignant:
Newsweeklies were intended to be counterprogramming to newspapers…Now, in response to accelerating news cycles, the newspapers have effectively become newsweekly-style digests themselves, resorting to muddy “news analysis” now that the actual news has hit us on multiple platforms before we even open our front door in the morning.
In effect, eyewitness spreading of news via text messages, Facebook, Twitter, and similar technologies have replaced the actual reporting of the news. A story is not covered completely in 140 characters, and it certainly is not un-biased, but stories are definitely broken.
This is particularly true in the other article of note which analyzes the riots in Iran over results of the government elections and allegations of voter fraud. The 24-hour news networks didn’t cover the story well over the weekend, yet live coverage via Twitter was, and continues to be, constant and real-time. The author ponders this question:
Are we approaching a point where political information is processed so fast that an event happens, information elites weigh in to shape the discourse surrounding it, the conventional wisdom is communicated to Congress, and elected leaders formulate reactions based on public opinion… all before most of even the formerly plugged in members of the public ever learn what on earth is going on, or have a chance to form an opinion?