Show Us the Money, Not the Tweets

Are attack ads worth our attention if nobody paid good money to get them on the air?

The Montreal Gazette’s L. Ian MacDonald deplores the way that social media has debased political discourse by compelling politicians and journalists to engage in endless tweeting and Facebooking. “At a certain point, it isn't even about the story anymore; it's about feeding the Beast,” he writes. Case in point are the ads released online by the Liberals and Conservatives earlier this month. They aren’t worth the coverage they’ve received, according to MacDonald. “A flight of negative and response ads is not news unless there's a serious media buy behind it,” he argues. We in The Mark Newsroom are divided on this point. True, it’s a journalistic rule of thumb that unless politicians are throwing a lot of money behind a media campaign, it’s just public bickering. But on the other hand, isn’t the genie out of the bottle on this one? Surely an age social media is helping topple governments, anyone who privileges expensive but antiquated media like TV over Twitter is hiding their head in the sand.

Responding to recent controversies over the use Twitter to cover trials like the Russell Williams case, an Ottawa Citizen editorial makes the case for drafting guidelines to allow social media in the courtroom. The idea is that because a crime is breach of the community’s laws, the community has a right to be in the courtroom, if not physically then at least in the form of an unfettered media. “Lawyers and judges can and should express specific concerns about the impact of new media on victims, witnesses, juries and accused,” says the Citizen. “But they should also acknowledge the enormous value of letting citizens … peek into the nation's courtrooms.” The idea that details heinous crimes like rape and murder will be reduced to 140 characters and fed to the public is, to us in the Newsroom, a little disturbing, and we’re not convinced by the Citizen’s argument that collectively, streams of tweets provide appropriate context. But our grandchildren will probably find it strange that we ever typed out full sentences, so again, the genie has fled the decanter, and we better agree to some rules to govern courtroom tweets.