Here at The Faster Times, it’s our job to follow the news as it develops. We sit, watching the stories come in, seeing what stories we need to give a voice. With the world media at our fingertips the last thing I was expecting was for the biggest break of the day to come rolling in when a good friend of mine at the Pulitzer Center, Jake Naughton, started tweeting and retweeting the events rolling out in Tunisia.
The story in its full extent will play out over the next few days, but the long and short of it is that long-time President and dictator, Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali, has been run out of the country by the violent protests that have been going on over the last few days, and the military has taken charge of Tunisia, with no end to the riots in sight. And yet I haven’t gotten these newsflashes from the major news sources, but rather from the social networking site Twitter. The best source for information is coming in with the Twitter hashtag #sidibouzid. The BBC and major American media are, at the time of this writing, still operating off of yesterday’s news of the riots. Only one source seems to be following the news in Tunisia as it happens: Al Jazeera. But here in the States, there’s a notable silence.
One man tweeted, “I just watched a government fall on Twitter while CNN interviewed the Jeopardy host about a robot contestant.”
This isn’t the first time in the modern era where Twitter seemed to find a higher purpose in citizen journalism. In the Summer of 2009, the failed Iranian Green Revolution was similarly ignored in its early days by the major news sources while Twitter was abuzz with on-scene updates from the Iranian citizenry. Time will tell if this is a more successful uprooting of an unpopular dictatorship, but we can all expect a similar level of coverage as to the legitimacy of Twitter as a news source. It seems clear, however, that when the usual outlets fail, we can count on Twitter to bring us the biggest world stories.
For the more on the story as it develops, hop over to our own coverage here: Revolution in Tunisia, Al Jazeera Breaks Report of Military Takeover
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Image from [thenextweb.com].
James Tynion IV
James Tynion IV is a writer and editor living in Manhattan who spends his days absorbing any media he can get his hands onto. Special preferences include, but are not limited to Comic Books, Animation, and British Television in general. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, ...
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