New Silicon Graffiti Video: 'Steer the Coverage'

We kick off another year of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog with a look at Old Media’s response to the horrific shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). For anyone who was on Twitter at the time the news first broke, it was quite a sight watching old media’s narrative emerge in real time even before any of the basic facts of the story were known.

But this was far from the first time that a narrative was preformed—or very quickly assembled in the wake of a shock event.  We try to place the MSM’s response to the Giffords shooting with some earlier attempts by the MSM to force the facts like a pretzel to fit an existing storyline:

• Krugman versus the clip-art.
• Camelot and the Prefab Narrative.
• Katrina: Iraq without Iraq.
• Airbrushing Rev. Wright out of the media.
• “N-Word 15 times.”
• Katie and Mayor Mike go looking for the Times Square Bomber in all the wrong places.
• “To be fair, there were some good reasons to steer the coverage initially in this direction.”

Tune in here to watch:

A handy portable, easily embeddable YouTube format of the video is also available. And click here for three years worth of earlier editions of Silicon Graffiti.