One of the things that media people who are olds struggle with is that the people formerly known as the audience have brains, voices, platforms, and megaphones just as big as theirs. Digital native media people—the youngs—seem to know this instinctively. Or maybe intuitively.
When one of the olds stumbles over his fingers—and it still happens more often than you’d expect—it doesn’t take long for someone to call him or her on it. It generally happens at the speed of the internet, which is to say, remarkably fast. Sometimes when it happens, it happens spectacularly.
The latest case is Bob Garfield, currently one half of National Public Radio’s On The Media. Garfield’s take on the internet is almost invariably contemptuous and sometimes just plain around the bend.
Derek Powazek caught Garfield about halfway around the bend in this week’s broadcast, and tweeted him out about it. Garfield, to his initial credit, responded in kind. But, sadly, Garfield demonstrated abundantly that he still just doesn’t get it. In the exchange that followed, Powazek patiently pointed out where Garfield was just plain wrong (much more patiently than I’d be capable of) and Garfield continued to dig himself in deeper, going so far around the bend he saw his own ass quite plainly in front of him. At one point, Garfield went so far as to tell Powazek to “use your head, not just your mouth.” And apparently, a private direct message was even worse.
Powazek published an analysis of the exchange that’s stunning in its clarity, writing:
“This is a case study in what happens when traditional journalists come face to face with the the immediacy of the current media landscape and just can’t handle it. It’s especially ironic because, in the most recent OTM, traditional journalism’s inability to handle Twitter was discussed for ten minutes!”
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