Characters find home on Twitter
Doucet admitted that, while under pressure from her superiors, she’d been something of a reluctant convert, the turning point coming a couple of years ago when anti-government protests in Iran were brutally suppressed. She was in the Beeb’s Tehran bureau when rumours began to circulate of large crowds gathering in the streets, and she recalled how a generational divide immediately manifested itself in the office as she and older colleagues went to their laptops to see what was moving on the wires while younger, mainly local, members of staff gathered on the sofas to commune with their smartphones. Almost immediately, the sofa group were shouting out instant eyewitness updates of what was happening at locations all around the city, while the older hands stared helplessly at their slow-moving computer screens.
Doucet is now an avid tweeter herself, noting that Twitter and Facebook really came into their own as news-disseminating tools during the Arab Spring. Given the powerful propaganda possibilities and amateur origins of so much of the content, she acknowledged there can still be major problems about accountability and accuracy but, overall, she left her listeners in no doubt that the social media revolution should be regarded as a boost rather than a threat to broadcast journalism in its pursuit of truth.
