Last week on This Week in Tech the panel had a prolonged discussion about how the "24 hour" cable news networks didn't cover the uprising over the Iranian elections whatsoever. Twitter, however, had a lot of first-person information. (Just have a look at the hashtag #Iranelection) Then today I saw this clip from the Daily Show

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John Stewart is busy making fun of CNN for never being accurate. (I'm no CNN fan, but it's not quite a fair characterization.) However, to me the story is that CNN is reacting to the criticism levelled against them by TWIT. Namely that they have slipped into irrelevance and that the real news breaks on Twitter. CNN is attempting to be relevant and timely. They are also simultaneously trying to discredit Twitter and using it as their only source. Any user of Twitter knows that it is really the quickest place to see breaking news. It needs to be used as a reference rather than as a source, but when something happens (just look at Iran) you will see it there first.

At least CNN pretends to recognize this fact. Even if they are being snarky about it, they know that there is news getting out of Iran mainly via Twitter.