The Iranian Revolutionary Road

I’m sure many people have been following the Iranian uprising. What we could also be seeing is the death of corporate journalism.

The control by the government regime of corporate and foreign journalists has put the power and obligation of reporting of the uprising back in the hands of the Iranian people. With the current state of Orwellian control over media distribution, it is now possible to shut down corporate web sites and identify and gag corporate journalists.

I’m sure many people have been following the Iranian uprising. What we could also be seeing is the death of corporate journalism.

The control by the government regime of corporate and foreign journalists has put the power and obligation of reporting of the uprising back in the hands of the Iranian people. With the current state of Orwellian control over media distribution, it is now possible to shut down corporate web sites and identify and gag corporate journalists.
As Gil Scott Heron presciently rapped “The revolution will not be televised”. But, as others have noted, it will be blogged, tweeted, youtubed and facebooked. By thousands of citizen journalists and the occasional old school revolutionary party.

The realisation of how impotent the corporate news has become, as it is already struggling with falling readership, is producing it’s last gasps of combined ominous warning and reading the writing on the wall.

But should we be so fearful of it’s collapse? The New York Times played a significant role in uncritically allowing Judith Miller and Michael Gordon to parrot the lying of the Bush-Cheney war criminals to justify the colonialisation of Iraq. The corporate media will, like the multinational banking corporations, plead that they are “too big to fail”. In fact, they are too big to survive, like the dinosaurs. Small media groups, critical thinking freelance journalists, and alternative subscription media models like Democracy Now! have managed to expand at exactly the same time.

There will be rearguard actions by the media companies, often with the same tactics, ideology, and owners as the multinational music companies, seeking to attack individuals in last desperate efforts to stay afloat as their business model collapses.