Editor’s Note:
Check this video out.
When Americans talk about the violence in Mexico they often view the situation through “western” eyes, thinking of Good Guys v. Bad Guys.
As this Al Jazeera report shows, the conflict is often between Bad Guys and Badder Guys and the public -the oppressed people of Mexico- have to stand on the sidelines, knowing but unable to alter the situation.
This video asks, Where do you turn when there is no one to turn to?
Commentary by Bruce Berman / Video by ©Al Jazeera 2014
There’s something happening in journalism.
When Aljazeera -who shouldn’t give a hoot about what’s happening in Mexico- publishes a well done piece on police kidnapping in Mexico, when Mexican journalists go ahead and publish their own work, under duress, knowing that to publish is to perish, and increasingly the xenophobic U.S. press dithers on entertainment and cheesy presidential inanities, we are talking about a new arrangement of the deck chairs on the the good ship journalism.
The truth is that most American newspapers and magazines aren’t undergoing the huge transformation they are experiencing in a vacuum. It’s not that hey are not irrelevant. They are merely irrelevant as the source for hard news (at a minimum) that relies on being the “go to” media.
For the most part, they are not that any longer.
If there is one source “out there,” it will be Tweeted or Posted on some social media site, within minutes, and then the fun begins. From there, people will Retweet it (RT), add links or complimentary sources and then the multiplier of social media begins. The question isn’t, Are you getting the news, but, rather, How much can you take?
Of course the eternal existential question remains, What happens when there is no longer a source of information (such as the New York Times. Sky News, CNN or Fox, i.e the “media giants?
This is not likely.
If there remains a Demand (i.e., if everyone isn’t lost in Soma or “Medical” Marijuana) there will be a Source and, unless the worst abridgment of press freedom ensues, there will be a supply. Even if the existing “giants,” were not there, the Tweetisphere will be Tweeting, Re-Tweeting and expanding each Tweet with their own links. In my opinion, and I think a quick survey of Twitter will confirm this, among the Social Bloggers that one Follows on Twitter, there appears to be a plethora of actual journalists, mixed in with 140 word dispatches by tradional media sources, interspersed with a growing army that is alert and tuned in (The Blogsphere), some are excellent writers, many are both entertaining and deadly to the point (humor and ridicule seem to lend themselves to the abbreviated format), enforced by the 140 character limit).
Hemingway would be proud (at the clarity and sparsity and, perhaps, the revolutionariness of the media).
As I said, There’s something happening in journalism.
If I had stopped at those five words, I’d still have 109 characters left to go.
