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You can yell all you want at your television, but no one will answer back, even if French President Nicolas Sarkozy or TF1 anchor Claire Chazal make a mistake during a live interview.
Enter Twitter. You can’t pack millions of spectators into your living room to watch a live presidential interview, but you can tweet about it – and get the corrections you expected in real time. Audiences can now simultaneously watch a political news program and get instant feedback online, enabling them to better analyze and evaluate what is being said on air.
This is the gist of what many journalists and cybernauts are expressing in the aftermath of Sarkozy’s televised interview bonanza last Sunday. Many grumbled at the four interviewers’ lack of fact-checking follow-ups, which enabled the French President to go almost unchallenged during his one-hour, eight-station interview. Corrections of his mistakes and approximations abounded in the press afterwards (watch the full interview at the end of this post).
Twitter, however, is the perfect platform for real-time verification of the many figures and numbers candidates wave around on air. Media outlets, politicians and netizens alike frantically commented Sunday’s interview to defend, criticize or mock the President.
https://twitter.com/Eric_Besson/status/163724025976209409Take French newspaper Libération‘s Désintox journalists, who picked up on Sarkozy’s false assertion that he had never pronounced the word “TVA social” [“Social VAT”]:
A video quickly followed the next day to confirm their claim:
Vodpod videos no longer available.So what are we dealing with? There are three events happening simultaneously. First, a television audience that is 17.5 million strong but remains completely passive. Second, an online community that is intensely active in real-time but is small in size (Twitter recently reached 5.2 million subscribers in France, compared to over 100 million in the United States). Third, the interview itself, with a President and four journalists who are completely oblivious to both audiences.
The solution is to merge everything together, according to media blogs and bloggers like Guy Birenbaum at French radio Europe 1:, with live fact-checking done in a way that enables the journalists to counter phony facts on air. He writes:
When will we finally decide to confront interviewed politicians with documents (audio, video, text, sources, links) in real time to show that they spruce up reality or become amnesiac?
These kind of media events, where spectators, interviewers and desk journalists work in a loop of feedback, are rare, but some are jumping on the bandwagon, like journalism students at the CFJ in Paris who recently partnered with YouTube for the 2012 campaign. The idea is to have two sets of journalists: interviewers who ask the actual questions and fact-checkers who verify information in real-time and pass it back to the interviewers for follow-ups – all of it visible to both television and Internet audiences.
Politicians beware. Soon your live gaffes and slip-ups will be retweeted right back into your faces.
More:
– A University of Illinois at Chicago study on social media and television interaction.
– Sarkozy’s interview:
Geeking the Elysée 