By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, October 5 -- Some stories are so good, at least for the New York Times, why bother to check if they are true?
It's an interesting topic, Twitter and the United Nations. But when the NYT put their new and energetic correspondent on the story, it was decidedly pro-Western and missed an elephant in the (chat) room.
The story, here, begins with US Ambassador Samantha Power, saying she "used Twitter to pre-empt criticism of the measure as lacking teeth because it had no automatic enforcement provision."
But there is a controversy about whether Ambassador Power is, in fact, sending out her own tweets. Even before General Debate week, Inner City Press reported that Power did not know her own Twitter handle and chided a vacuous unauthorized NYT profile for missing it, while relying heavily on the "ghost tweet."
After that, Inner City Press was approached and told that while Power's tweets are "proofread" and processed by others -- that is, she does not send them out -- she is an author. And a good one, we might add.
Later in General Debate week, Inner City Press covered PowerTweetGate in a BloggingHeads.tv segment with Robert Wright, which @BloggingHeads twice send out on Twitter.
More evidence that Power doesn't do her own tweeting come from the current Security Council trip in Africa. While UK ambassador Mark Lyall Grant and Australia's Gary Quinlanare tweeting in real time, NOTHING from Samantha Power.
Inner City Press has e-mailed questions to two of her spokesmen, about something Inner City Press is told by sources Power said in a meeting with Congolese president Joseph Kabila - but nothing.
(Inner City Press went on Security Council trips to Africa in 2010 and 2008 but was banned this time by France; the French picked scribes from Reuters and Voice of Americahave tweeted little, and written fluff.)
Meanwhile, the New York Times while putting in Human Rights Watch robo-tweet does not mention any "non-Western" tweeting at the UN. For example, Bolivia's Permanent Representative is active, including against the US's NSA spying. Further afield, Rwanda's foreign minister is tweeting about the trip Samantha Power is (tweet-less) on.
Is the New York Times a global paper, as it claims, or a US (liberal) rag? We still retain, at least as to the just turned over UN bureau, an open mind. Watch this site.
