Mumbai attacks and the role of media: Television to Twitter

Posted on December 1, 2008 / 5 Comments

As usual, media is blamed for their role in Mumbai. Unconfirmed reports claimed the terrorists trapped in Taj Mahal Palace constantly watched TV for news and they might have got a feeling of excitement if not ideas from the live coverage. Stupid guys. They never knew what they missed. The best ball-by-ball coverage was hardly on TV but on Twitter, anybody could have accessed thru a mobile. (Twitter added hashtags to terms like ‘Mumbai’ and ‘Attack’) Indian government at one stage requested ‘Twitters’ not to tweet anything about police activity, but it was more because the mainstream media too started depending on them rather than their own paid correspondents.

However, unlike in case of 9/11 no mobile based interactions with the victims were heard – which was bit surprising given the increasing mobile use in India.

There were also reports that the terrorists accessed British news sites using Black Berries. Well, on second thoughts, they might even have had a quick look at tweets – before being gunned down.

5 Comments

gunjan
December 1, 2008, 6:38 pm
When people were dying, the television media people were busy in increasing the TRP of there channel. They were trying to money out of the condemning incident.
But one thing I liked they have put pressure on Govt. to learn from previous mistake.
Foxhound
December 1, 2008, 9:44 pm
That’s life brother. Idiots will be idiots and rumours will always fly.
Nuwan
January 12, 2009, 3:56 pm
Speaking of Twitter … Aljazeera is using yet another open source application called “Ushahidi” – http://www.ushahidi.com/ , which is coupled with Twitter to track the incidents in Gaza – http://labs.aljazeera.net/warongaza/
shivang
October 8, 2011, 4:05 pm
the media is showing their stupidity by making their channel popular and not worrying about the hundreds of life that were going on and on in the mumbai attacks.
ss
June 24, 2012, 6:47 pm
the media were helping the terrorist by telecasting the activities of the soldiers live who gave there life to safe ours, which helped the terrorist who was watching the TV inside the taj hotel or to the informers of the terrorist……….

telecasting the activities soldiers is one dumbest ideas of the media , it was the duty of the government to take the media away……..

if they had not telecast-ed live then it would have been an element of surprise and the terrorist would been an Clean swipe and we would have lost brave soldiers………..