A major earth-shaking seismic shift is happening right before us in the lead-up to the summer World Olympics games hosted by Beijing, and the peoples of China.
From my 3rd space perch, straddled between EAST and WEST, I am vicariously experiencing something completely unprecedented in the realm of news and news as its traditional purveyors in the West have managed them, in the past.
Forget about the news gatekeepers from both sides of EAST and WEST.
The netizens in cyberspace have won. And they have spoken loud and clear. Citizen journalism, in its rawest, have ran around, in front, and behind the established Western news media "ratpack" making the latter look dumb, misinformed, and exposing their biases and unprofessionalism.
What free press ? More like an irresponsible and misinformed press to me.
The 1989 Tiananmen events in China was fundamentally a CNN cable news event. Then, it exceeded the traditional print news media in terms of the immediacy and imagery of the event unfolding in Beijing in front of China's public square, Tiananmen.
CNN, then, was one of the few "news gatekeepers" which reported the events through their "filtered lenses." The net was in its infantile stage. Not much of a factor in spreading the news.
Fast forward to Christmas, 2004, with the Giant Tsunami Castastrophe which unleashed nature's powerful force upon Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand, killing more than 225,000 people in eleven countries, and inundating coastal communities with waves up to 30 meters (100 feet).
The disaster is known by the scientific community as the Great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake,and is also known as the Asian Tsunami and the Boxing Day Tsunami.
In this catastrophic narrative, it was the amateur digital afficionados who took over and surpassed CNN and pushed them over the cliff; it was the digital cameras which captured the breath, scope, and disastrous human consequences of these major natural calamity. And mainstream news media just sat and watched by the sidelines.
A year later, in August, 2005, a slightly different scenario occured during New Orleans, and Katrina, and the resulting breaking of the levees, flooding jazz city. This time, the focus is not just upon the relief effort but on the utter ineffective, disorganized, inutile rescue and relief efforts by U.S. government officials. On this catastrophe, the lenses of amateur digital techies were less pronounced.
The digital cameras were rolling, but it was the media pundits such as Cooper Anderson who controlled the microphone and shaped the spin.
Fast forward to today, April, 2008, a major thing happened.
It is the netizens from the global community of net bloggers and their network of newbies and techies who have taken over from the established mainstream Western news media organizations such as CNN, NBC, FOX, ABC, CBS, BBC, CBC.
And more, Chinese netizens, from inside and outside China, in the global Diasporic communities of ethnic Chinese overseas, and their clusters and mobilizing network of bloggers, who have called the Western mainstream news media organizations on their biases and "pervertedly anti-China" reporting and coverage.
I know.
I am one of those "bloggers" in blogosphere watching and observing from my perch, watching the unfolding events.
Naked indeed it is now that the Western news media is accused of covering the Olympics torch relay through their "protest lenses."
And what is so astonishing about this is that netizens inside and outside China are mobilizing in the net and in blogosphere to circumvent, fight back, and run circles around CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, BBC, and CBC.
Thanks to GOOGLE, and YouTube. Netizen journalism is in. Blogging in blogosphere is providing the news in its raw, without the usual media gatekeepers. To boot, Western news media were exposed by global netizens to have distorted the reports about the Tibet riots, with the exception of a few objective Western reporters, e.g. James Miles of the Economist.
And if you go into YouTube, and click on, you will know that the netizen journalists, in all the cities covered by the torch relay, notwithstanding their inexperience or rawness, at least are providing a narrative other than those filtered through Western mainstream news media.
And where's print news media in all of these ? Are they running far behind and can't catch up ?
The jury is out; you be the judge. Nakedness characterizing the mainstream news media ratpack and the biases is metaphorically underscored in the following YouTube video in the perverted city of San Francisco, by clicking below to the URL hyperkink:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3ddmYN8cRI&feature=related
