The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since 1980 and is recognized globally as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. He's a columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera and Linux Journal and frequently appears in other publications both online and in print. Additionally, Dave maintains four weblogs: The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, Ask Dave Taylor, Dave On Film, and GoFatherhood. Based in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs, as well as active member of his community and busy single father to three children.

Mainstream media wasn't asleep during the Iranian election!

I know that it's a popular pastime among the social media cogniscenti to talk about how real-time information sources like Twitter are constantly trumping the so-called mainstream news media's ability to cover stories, but I have to say that the current drumbeat of Twitter vs. CNN on the Iranian elections is a bit too much to bear without some sort of reality check.

As you should be aware, the last few days have seen a surprisingly controversial election for the role of President of Iran, with moderate candidate Mirhossein Mousavi believing that he had a substantial lead over President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The poll results were dramatic: Ahmadinejad got 62% of the popular vote, while Mousavi only got 33%.

If the election wasn't rigged.

Meanwhile, flash to the social media types who are crowing about how CNN apparently wasn't aggressively covering the growing story and how that just demonstrates yet again how mainstream news sources just don't get it. (For a few examples, see Robert Scoble's piece on how "Twitter kicked CNN's butt", or Daniel Terdiman's piece about the "#cnnfail" Twitter hashtag, or Marshall Kirkpatrick saying "CNN should check Twitter for news about Iran").

The problem is that all of these self-appointed pundits are missing that CNN isn't the entirety of the mainstream media and that all the other sources were right on top of the story. This was a CNN failure, if it was anything, not a failure of mainstream media.

To demonstrate this point, check out this graph from Google News on who had this story, when:

In this graph, A = ABC News, B = Wall Street Journal, C = New York Times, D = The Washington Post, E = Dar Al Hyat, an Arabic-language news outlet, F= Reuters, G = BBC News, H = PRESS TV, and so on. More importantly, though, notice how many outlets were following this growing story as it transpired: On June 12, almost 2000 stories were filed in various news media.

This is "missing the story"?

I'm a bit of a social media snob too, so I get the zeal to show those old-school journalists how they're missing the boat, but in this case, it just isn't true.

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