#CNNFail – Can Twitter out-cover CNN?

As mobs of Iranians flooded into the streets of their country and Twitter exploded with news of the post-election riots, news network CNN had hardly a word to say on the subject.

Many of us remember amazing CNN coverage as the bombs dropped in Iraq not many years ago. We watched as a small group of reporters got the news out from their hotel room in downtown Baghdad. How times have changed! This time, with important and explosive happenings in a different Middle Eastern country, CNN was almost entirely silent on the subject. Instead, it was Twitter that was filled with live alerts of the riots from all over Iran.

Cnn.com had no stories about the massive protests on behalf of Mir Hossein Mousavi all day on Saturday. Mousavi was reported to be the loser of the election by the Iranian government, who said he had lost to the sitting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to a CNET story. This situation provoked unrest and led to widespread street clashes, something almost unheard of in tightly leashed Iran, reflecting popular Iranian public opinion that the election had been rigged.

That sentiment was echoed, quietly, by the U.S. government on Saturday night. The New York Times quoted senior U.S. officials as having said, “The Obama administration is determined to press on with efforts to engage the Iranian government, despite misgivings about irregularities in the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

Twitter, while CNN was silent, was full of first-hand accounts from the front lines of the riots. Although Twitter seemed to be on the forefront of the news, there was also significant coverage from other media sources, from the BBC to NPR. That made the relative since of CNN on the story even more puzzling.

Finally, the hashtag “CNNFail” began to become common on Twitter, making it easy to identify those posts that were involved in an ongoing discussion about the lack of CNN coverage of the Iranian election riots. Although there were not as many posts containing the tag #NPRWin, there were a significant number of posts praising NPR’s ongoing coverage of the street mayhem in Iran.

Perhaps it is just that what was once rapid CNN coverage of events has been made to seem slow when we have thousands of amateur reporters Twittering from their cell phones. More likely, it is a combination of two things. There are a lot more Twitter users than CNN reporters, and they can be very vocal, as CNN has learned. At the same time, it is equally likely that CNN has been resting on its laurels for too long, and may want to start acting like the news-gathering organization that it once was.

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