Tweeters Rip CNN for Its Coverage (or Lack Thereof) of Iran Post-Election Demonstrations
The hashtag #CNNFail rockets to the top of Twitter's most tweeted topics over the weekend. Here's why.
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Remember almost 20 years ago, on that first night of the first Gulf War, when everyone gathered around TV sets to listen to CNN's John Holliman and Peter Arnett describe Iraqi anti-aircraft guns desperately trying to shoot down U.S. bombers? CNN's reporting was revolutionary at the time. Holliman and Arnett (and anchor Bernie Shaw) were holed up in a hotel (taking cover under beds at times), but thanks to modern technology, they were able to bring everyone in the U.S. (and around the world) over to Baghdad and experience exactly what it was like to be in a city under siege. (Watch/listen to it here. (Thank you, YouTube))
Well, apparently a slew of viewers turned to CNN, CNN.com, and CNNbrk (CNN's Twitter feed) on Saturday for similarly groundbreaking coverage of the post-election demonstrations in Iran—which al Jazeera called "the biggest unrest since the 1979 revolution"—and did not find what they were looking for.
"Hours after Iranian police began clashing with tens of thousands of people in the street, the top story on CNN.com remains peoples' [sic] confusion about the switch from analog TV signals," Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote on Web technology news site ReadWriteWeb in a post titled "Dear CNN, Please Check Twitter for News About Iran."
On cable, CNN carried reports throughout the day. But it wasn't the nonstop, rolling coverage some viewers apparently were expecting.
So the viewers got mad. Over the weekend, the hashtag #CNNFail rocketed to the top of the list of Twitter's most tweeted topics.
@dogstop: #CNNfail one of the biggest news stories of the year and what do we get Palin vs. David Letterman the media talking about the media@michaelcanfield: @ralavi Can we stop tragedy before it is too late? Ask for live coverage #CNNFail #IranElection RT Please Before It's Too Late
@AndeeD: @cnnbrk Please break into your stupid reruns of old news and cover LIVE what's happening in IRAN. You are making yourself irrelevant
BayNewser wasn't watching television this weekend, so we can't tell you what CNN or CNN.com was or what not reporting. But here are some thoughts about what may have gone wrong—and some lessons news organizations might want to take from this experience.
The lessons—after the jump.
Just four tweets in 36 hours? CNN should have had a producer on point, filtering, culling, and re-tweeting the most powerful tweets coming out of Iran and elsewhere—or, if they wanted to keep CNNbrk fairly high level, at a minimum they should have redirected followers to other CNN Twitter feeds with more detailed reports.
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