Will The Iranian Revolution Be Televised in the U.S?

As the uprising begins to turn violent, with protesters throwing stones at Iranian officials and Iranian officials mercilessly beating hundreds of protesters, the New York Times' Bill Keller talks to an anonymous Iranian election official who says this: "They didn't rig the vote. They didn't even look at the vote. They just wrote the name and put the number in front of it." How this note which I got from a great Gawker post on the Iranian Revolution, didn't get larger play I will never know. Its clear that the election was stolen for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Report after report as this great Gawker post makes clear: # Iranians went to the polls last week in large numbers (85% of registered voters turned out) to vote in that country's Presidential election, a sign usually favorable to candidates challenging incumbents. # Reports begin to emerge that the high turnout has definitely worked in favor of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who many, including former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, believe will win in a landslide. # Turnout is so great that Iranian election officials extend the voting deadline an additional three hours so that more citizens are allowed to cast their ballots. # Within hours of the polls closing, the Iranian government announced that incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the election with 62% of the vote, reported to be the largest margin of victory in the history of Iranian Presidential elections, while main opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi received only 33% of the vote. Due to the large number of hand ballots cast in Iran, this declaration of victory seemed extremely odd, as it was expected to possibly take days for election officials to count all of the ballots. # British journalist Lindsey Hilsum files this remarkable report from Tehran, in which she says she feels as though she "went to sleep in one country and woke up in another." This ground breaking event is what News organizations let alone citizens of the world want to know about. The role of the media must be to tell the full story of events especially as the government moves to silence the truth of the day. That is THE role of journalism. And so CNN (who once made its place in the world shedding in depth light on events like this) spent an hour talking about whether Twitter who has been on the cutting edge telling the people's story is relevant or not. NOT, the significance of such an uprising, why this might have happened, and the cultural and historical context for it. No, they covered themselves being called out on Twitter as the hashtag (a way for people to group their 140 word comments) #CNNFAIL was rising to the top. Despite this possibly earth dynamic changing event happening CNN covered well everything but it. This is the state of journalism today. Why cover the actual news when you can get talking heads who know NOTHING about Iran to talk about the vehicle Iranians are using to circumvent the government run media. A different Gawker article that nails CNN: Over the weekend CNN's Howard Kurtz asked America the burning question, "are we going overboard with this Twitter business?" Meanwhile, CNN virtually ignored an event overseas with the potential to alter world history, an event reported extensively by Twitter users. ...To think that the very social networking tools conceived as intangible ideas by young Americans just a few short years ago in dorm rooms and basements and garages have now come to fruition as something tangible with the power to influence the course of events halfway across the world—Well, it's kind of breathtaking. Meanwhile, Howard Kurtz had Rick Sanchez and sportswriter Gregg Doyel on Reliable Sources for an utterly useless but incredibly ironic debate over Twitter's relevance. Journalism is in a terrible state and CNN is proudly marching to complete irrelevance. As I like to say you can watch CNN for 24 hours and still not get any news or know what is going on in the world. Its sad that this once great network has fallen so so far. RSS