The New York Times on Moldova: Twits, Not Tweets
Wishing to bolster its own ad revenues, the Times falsely claimed that Moldovans used Twitter to rally the masses against the reelection of a Communist government.
On April 7, the New York Times ran a story titled “Protests in Moldova Explode, with Help of Twitter.” It claimed that “a crowd of more than 10,000 young Moldovans” had “materialized seemingly out of nowhere” to protest against the reelection of a Communist government “by enlisting text-messaging, Facebook and Twitter, the social messaging network.” The Times breathlessly announced that the protesters had created “their own searchable tag on Twitter, rallying Moldovans to join and propelling events in this small former Soviet state onto a Twitter list of newly popular topics, so people around the world could keep track.”
It was a surprising story, given that Moldova doesn’t rank in the top 120 nations of the world for per capita GDP. The economy is so weak that one quarter of the nation’s workforce is employed abroad, and the local population relies heavily on their remittances. Though it has over 4 million citizens, only 700,000 of them are identified as Internet users (in other words, roughly 85% of the population goes nowhere near cyberspace), the same number of webheads as there are in El Salvador. An average Moldovan earns less than $150 per month, which translates into an hourly wage of 93 cents for full-time employment. In light of this, one might have thought Moldovans might be more interested in a Twix than a Twitter. But there wasn’t a single word challenging the notion of a Twitterized revolution in the Times report, so readers could rest assured the paper had vetted the claim and confirmed it beyond cavil.
Except that it hadn’t. The very next day, writing on the Frontline Club website, PhD student Daniel Bennett exposed the real facts, commenting, “Not many of the people who have actually written these and similar articles have bothered to find some tweets that might hint at some kind of organizational role for Twitter.” Not the New York Times, anyway. It turns out that hardly anyone in Moldova is registered on Twitter. Tweets could not have been posted from the main public square where the protests took place because there was no cell phone reception there. One of the main organizers of the rally, internationally known journalist Natalia Morar, explained on her Russian-language blog that emails and SMS cell phone messages brought out the protesters. Perhaps the Times reporter didn’t speak Russian.
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Kim Zigfeld is a New York City-based writer who publishes her own Russia specialty blog, La Russophobe. She also writes about Russia for the American Thinker and for Russia! magazine and is researching a book on the rise of dictatorship in Putin’s Russia.
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11 Comments
1. Glenn Jericho:I read the same thing from Der Spiegel the other day. They must be getting their crap information from the same people.
“Moldau: Revolte der Jungend
Apr 25, 2009 - 12:58 am 2. HalifaxCB:…Die jungen Leute protestieren gegen den Wahlsieg der Kommunisten, sie wollen mit der kommunistischen Vergangenheit brechen. Sie koordinieren ihre Aktionen im Internet– ueber TWITTER, Blogs und Chatrooms…” — Der Spiegel, No. 16/2009
“All the news that is fit to print” now should probably read “Any news we can find (since we don’t have the money or reputation to hire real reporters) plus any conceivable fantasy to fit the gaping holes left by the fact no one wants to advertise with us any more”.
Plus maybe a statue out front of the iconic Times reporter, Jason Blair ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair ), the exemplar of NYT journalism ethics…
Apr 25, 2009 - 6:21 am 3. gnubi:NYT is in a bad spot. Unreliable and slanted reporting leads to declining circulation leads to desperate and sensationalistic reporting leads to more distrust leads to declining circulation. Death spiral. The market has a natural “fairness doctrine.”
Apr 25, 2009 - 9:05 am 4. Floyd Looney:Where do the lies end?
I guess they don’t.
Apr 25, 2009 - 11:23 am 5. JasonS:To be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter is paying news outlets like the NY Times to promote them. I say this because it seems like there are a suspiciously large number of Twitter mentions in the media of late – it’s as if journalists are finding all kinds of questionable excuses to shoehorn the Twitter name into their articles.
Hey, the NY Times is headed for the swill bucket ain’t they? Might as well try and reel in as much advertising revenue as they can.
Apr 25, 2009 - 11:22 pm 6. HalifaxCB:JasonS @5 – I think it’s simpler. I know a couple of “name” reporters, and the one overarching trait they have in common is the need to be seen as “cool”. Yeah, it looks stupid on folks nearing retirement age, but it seems to be prerequisite for MSM flunkies.
Apr 26, 2009 - 2:03 pm 7. Yaakov Watkins:Same with most news sources. They don’t respond to anything they don’t like. I remember when I sent snail mail to them 12 years ago asking how they verified news stories. No response.
Apr 26, 2009 - 5:20 pm 8. Class Clown:Watching the New York Times flounder makes my heart go all a Twitter….
Apr 26, 2009 - 5:24 pm 9. deguello:Tne NYSLIMES :Twits and Twats using Twitter,to write twaddle for nitwits!
Apr 27, 2009 - 5:43 am 10. Marsha:NY Times is still around? Why?
Apr 27, 2009 - 7:31 am 11. kabud:Romania has become the second former Soviet bloc country, after Russia, to revive the KGB slogan “America-is-the-enemy.”
In 1978.. Romania had one major intelligence service: the Securitate, staffed with ca. 16,000 operations officers. Now it has six (SRI, SIE, UM 0962, STS, SPP, DGIA), which have absorbed most of the former Securitate officers and its modus operandi. According to the Romanian media, these six ghosts of communism are bloated with 30,000 officers.
The SRI (domestic counterintelligence) alone, covering 22 million people, has ca. 12,000 officers. Its French equivalent, the DST, covering a population three times as large, has 6,000. Its German counterpart, the BfV, which covers 82 million people, has only 2,448 officers.
If the United States were to apply this Romanian ratio to its population, the FBI would have ca. 190,000 agents, not the 12,156 it has today.
Older Romanians still put a finger to their lips to signify the potential presence of hidden microphones. No wonder over 2 million people have left the country since communism collapsed.
http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=7B3333A7-DE30-400E-8051-2B8AF0E3CE8E
Apr 28, 2009 - 7:04 am