Colorado Massacre – Social Media Rises

As much as the main stream media believes they control the news, the recent shooting in Colorado has shown the power and immediacy of Social Media.

The Colorado shooting spree proved beyond a doubt, we are all citizen journalists.

I first learned of the tragedy as it was unfolding by checking my Twitter feed at 5:30 am as I was leaving for a  crossfit workout.  The information gleaned from the tweets was of a barbaric attack in a movie theater in Colorado. I was still pleased with the judges evaluation of my garden from the day before and this news took the wind out of that bubble of happiness. I re-tweet’ed the information to my followers prior to my workout then rechecked my Twitter feed before arriving at work.

Around 7:30 am following a link on Twitter,  I watched the chilling cell phone video of movie theater attendees running out of the building, some covered in blood. By this time, body count numbers were being floated on Twitter posts and this situation was looking even more grim.

8:17 EST – With the name and age of the alleged attacker released, the MSM tackles the story on ABC’s Good Morning America. During the show, George Stephanopoulos and Brian Ross – while some victims of this tragedy were losing their battle for life – speculated that the identified gunman was a tea party activist based upon a similar name discovered on a local Tea Party group. George and Brian reached a new low in broadcast journalism.   John Kass calls out their craven disregard for truth in favor of political opportunism:

“George Stephanopoulos spends weekends in my apartment building because he comes down for ‘The Week Without David Brinkley’ or whatever that TV show is now called,” Hitchens had said. “We had a drink around the time of the Diana business, and he said, ‘Hey, Tony Blair’s doing brilliantly, isn’t he? This is his Oklahoma City.’ Those guys think about things that way.”

Yes those guys do think about things that way. Not about evil as a real presence, but as something symbolic, evil in the abstract, as a device to be used to political advantage.

It’s still only July, a lifetime until November.

10:51 AM Drudge Report first posted a link to the cell phone video.

It was on Twitter that I first learned of Jessica Ghwai/ Jessica Redfield story. A woman who narrowly escaped a mass shooting in Canada only to die in the Colorado shooting spree.

Since this tragedy broke on Twitter, Twitchy has been busy – cataloging the names of the shooting victims, tracking verifiable tweets coming from those who survived and following the inevitable outbursts of stupidity from the MSM.

As the day progressed, I followed local and national news reports of this tragedy and found a majority of the reporting revolved around reading Tweets on air. Every interview and every story produced yesterday, I had already been made of aware of via social media.

In essence, social media citizen reporters scooped this devastating story hours before the MSM could get their feet on the ground.  Outside of scoring a vile political point, the main stream media appeared redundant and unable to match the speed or accuracy of citizen journalism via social media.

Did you follow both social media and main stream media for updates on the shooting tragedy in Colorado? If  so, how did you find the coverage?