Has Mir-Hossein Mousavi ever Heard of Twitter?

The US media has absolutely collapsed over the last several years. If you tried to watch CNN's coverage of the Iranian uprising over the weekend, you were probably glued to the TV only because it was simply amazing how bad the coverage has been. TJ Holmes, their lead anchor, actually couldn't find Iran on a map and couldn't differentiate between the country's leaders (he began referring to them as the dead one and the one who is living).

Several months ago, Twitter raised a fortune from the major VCs, including Sequoia, with no business plan. As CNN and Fox have both failed as broadcast networks and with their parent companies fell in dreadful financial condition, the VCs came up with a desperate and bold master plan for Twitter. They took this business which was doomed to failure because nobody really cares whether their friends just got off of the toilet and essentially sold the product as a real opportunity to boost the major media companies. CNN and Fox in their own desperate effort to save their businesses believed that they could monitize people's fascination with certain of their high profile anchors (such as Anderson Cooper, Geraldo Rivera, Rick Sanchez, etc.). Apparently, some of this got some traction as some began to read Cooper's or Rivera's twitts.

The idea that these anchors are themselves the news and should have anything to twitt about is extraordinary. But it is now being extended to an unreasonable degree. The anchors and the media have now created the misperception that somehow the enabling technology (Twitter) is a factor in everything that they are reporting on.

Iran is a closed country. The media is managing to get some cell phone videos that are being posted across the internet. While social networking may explain the way that news today is transmitted through open societies, there is no proof that social networking, or much less Twitter, is playing any role in Iran today.

Twitter is a remarkable phenomenon. So is what is going on in Iran. It is sad that media is so poor today that in their effort to explain both phenomenon, they have just lobbed the two together.