Salon - Palin, Twitter, how she made the media slaves to her 140-character bursts of self-expression

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Sunday, Aug 8, 2010 11:01 ET

Sarah Palin and the age of tweetalism

She's made all of the media slaves to her 140-character bursts of self-expression

By Steve Almond



http://www.salon.com/news/politics/sarah_palin/index.html?story=/news/feature/2010/08/08/palin_media_twitter

It’s not exactly a shocker that Sarah Palin loves to tweet. Indeed, Twitter seems to have been invented expressly for the former Alaska governor, a public figure whose prodigious need for attention is matched only by her microscopic attention span.

What’s surprising is how enthusiastically Palin’s tweets are covered as news. She’s become the avatar of a new breed of quasi-journalism. Call it tweetalism.

Consider the "story" the Associated Press sent out on its wires just last week. The headline read, "Sarah Palin Hits Obama for 'View' Appearance." The sole source for this item was a Palin tweet in which she complained that the president should be visiting our "porous US/Mexican border" rather than gabbing with the hosts of a popular daytime chatfest. The item ran in hundreds of media outlets.

Just a week earlier, Palin scored massive coverage by exhorting New Yorkers, via Twitter, to "refudiate" the plan to build a Muslim center near ground zero.

If you want to understand how severely the Fourth Estate has degraded its own mission, the rise of tweetalism should serve as Exhibit A.

Palin has every right — even an obligation, as a possible presidential candidate — to critique Obama’s positions on vital issues such as immigration. But her tweets don’t do that. On the contrary, they offer up talking points meant to shift the focus from an honest debate of policy to public recrimination.

It’s certainly possible that a legitimate news organization such as the Associated Press might use a Palin tweet as a pretext to question the presumptive candidate about her own positions. But that’s not how tweetalism works. It’s a genre of coverage created by, and slavishly obedient to, the sound bite.

The only real "news" in the AP story about Palin’s "View" tweet — delivered via spokesperson, natch — is that Palin plans to visit the border "in the near future."

[FSogol]

1. Can't she see the border from her porch? If not, I'm disappointed.

:shrug:

[Demeter]

2. The Media Focuses On Palin To Better Ignore The Rest of the World