Rachel Maddow and Richard Engel on MSNBC:
Rachel Maddow: Are we likely to see the amount of video that we’re getting of what’s happening in Iran decline over the next few days as Western sources are kicked out?
Richard Engel: That will to some degree happen, but what the Iranian crackdown is — it’s very old-fashioned — they want to control the media so they’re cutting off phones and they’re kicking out established reporters and harassing reporters. That’s a very, if you will, 1980s, 1990s way of a media crackdown. It has not helped them control the information war. Already online if you look on sites like YouTube there’s more than 3,500 videos that have been posted by demonstrators — that’s videos — plus tens of thousands of pictures, in addition to all the information that they’re exchanging on sites like Twitter … And this is the class of people that are much more savvy. The Revolutionary Guards, and the establishment of the state, it’s not really a very technologically savvy group, versus the students, the intellectuals, the moderates, the … the geeks, if you will.
Rachel Maddow: Yay for the geeks! The revolutionary geeks.
Leave a Reply