keen anthony

How to broadcast a revolution

The major news networks’ failure to have a presence in Zuccotti Park last tuesday night during the mayor’s raid and attempt at shutting down Occupy Wall Street was a problem of evolution and dedication, not a problem of police censorship.

I watched most of it as it happened via a mobile streaming feed broadcast to Ustream and Livestream via an Android mobile phone on a 4G network. No Wi-Fi was needed, but that would have added some redundancy to the feed. I saw every significant moment that occurred between the hours of 1 am and 5 am. I also actively observed the silence from Reuters, CNN, and other news outlets. Whilst CNN blamed the NYPD for preventing their reporters from entering the area, protesters and observers still managed to slip past. Nothing prevented CNN nor MSNBC from sending a single staffer into the park with just a smartphone on a fast network. There was a failure on the part of media outlets to adapt and adopt new technologies to make information sharing better and faster. But moreover, there has been a clear lack of dedication on the part of major news organizations in covering this story. Coming off of coverage of the Egyptian revolution, journalists and private citizens willingly risked more than arrest in order to document the story.

If there is one thing that we should take from this week in NYC, it is that social networking and consumer grade mobile communications tech used together is a light in the dark. If Egypt and Iran were a validation of the value of Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook in getting information out, then the Occupy movement is a validation of the value in mobile streaming (Ustream and Livestream particularly) to accomplish the same. Tuesday night in Zuccotti Park, whilst CNN and MSNBC gave light coverage of the NYPD raid, I and potentially millions across the Internet watched the events live as they unfolded. Two things are worth noting:

1) The major news outlets had only hearsay knowledge of what was happening in the park due to Mayor Bloomberg’s media blackout order which prevented members of the press from getting past police or flying over the park.

2) For perhaps the first time in American history, Americans watching over the Internet received unfiltered, unprocessed, and unspun, news from ground zero of a major news event.

There was a perspective. After all, most if not all private videographers and photographers covering the protests were themselves protesters or other sympathetic to the Occupy movement. But it is important to note also that these video streams were live and unedited, and virtually nothing but will prevented those opposing the protests from being present to capture the event from another perspective. Moreover, the perspective given was local perspective, a significant change from the cable news paradigm that dominates televised news.

Simply, the Occupy movement is proof that televised news, especially cable news, is a dinosaur facing extinction. There is a smaller, faster animal now, and it is fierce.