South Ossetia web coverage

You might have heard news about the conflict started in South Ossetia. Local news channels, sandwiched it in between news of Permatang Pauh elections and the Beijing Olympics.

There are not much coverage by major news agencies else where either.

Other news agencies who covered the event, are painting a picture of Russian’s aggression into Georgia. On the Internet, it’s a whole other story.

The conflict is over, now it is just a war of words and propaganda from all sides. I’ve been reading news and stories from both sides. The best place to get all this information, to my surprise, is at Digg.com. The stories that reached the front page and the discussions that followed the story on Digg are worth reading.

On the Internet, we see the other side of the story.

Where else can you see video of Georgian President Saakashvili eating his tie. This YouTube video on 1:00 timeline you can see Mr. Saakashvili literally eating his tie.

Or this video of when Fox News interviews a 12 year old girl and her aunty. Fox News fail to get the ‘right‘ response, the response that they wanted, when both of the South Ossetia survivors starts to thank the Russian troops for for protecting them from Georgian troops.

I can imagine people on the news control room yelling to the news reader, “cut it, cut her of, we going for a commercial break now!”

Then again the 12 year old girl and her aunty might be working for the Russia. They might just be KGB agents send to say just that.

There are also a number of websites that points out a somewhat over-exaggerated set of photos that Georgia had released to Reuters and other news agencies.

You can see the same dead body in different places and in different positions. The same guy of which in one photo a soldier and in other photos a civilian.

Propaganda happens, we wont really know what’s going on. Even years after the war ends, nobody still knows what happens.

These days however, it’s still easy to fool mainstream news agencies, but it’s not that easy to fool the peoples of the Interweb. This is something propaganda machines should take note.

Iran tried to fooled the world with their super successful missile launch by photoshopping an extra missile. It’s an epic fail on the web and had become somewhat of a meme.

We live in a time where everyone has the power to publish. The Internet had made that possible. News gets analyze and people now could come to their on conclusion. This is interesting, no?

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