the lazy way out

i come here not to bury twitter
but to praise it

and bury the mainstream media

having made the mistake of watching cnn in an
airport recently

i was reminded
again
of how much they jumped on the trend
having already seen them namedrop it incessantly
the last time i was on the road

hint
i don't watch cnn otherwise

so now
in its finest moment
they've almost undermined the real impact of it
as an aggregator of voices
a megaphone
a searchable
always-on
speakers' corner

by first using it to get america's opinion on
jon and kate
whoever the fuck they are

but beyond undermining its importance
they also lean on it as a substitute
for thorough reporting

which should be laughable on its face

but to put it in a simpler perspective
let's look at it this way
we would never
in a million years
put up with it if our
beat reporters covered the local nine
by relying on tweets from the whiner line crowd

so why is it okay for events of international import

that's not to belittle what's being written
by people in the thick of it
quite the opposite
what they're tweeting
demands follow-up
it demands reporting

personally i like twitter enough that i don't want it
not to mention all the good it can clearly do
reduced to a fad

because if reading this didn't make it clear
a short attention span
stream-of-consciousness

suits a lot of us well