Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

142 Online Journalism
rather a local inflection on the global. Zippergate was a world story
with implications for readers everywhere. The Star.arabia.com
website, an English language site from Jordan whose main
constituency is expatriate Jordanians, saw the story mainly as a
‘Jewish plot against the President of the United States, aimed at
distracting the US from implementing their proposals for the stalled
peace process’. The same feature ponders whether ‘Clinton will
resort to another foreign policy adventure … to deflect attention
from home’, 25 perhaps prefiguring the Kosovo intervention.
Zippergate thus comprised a genuine global spectacle commodity.
On one hand, it produced a set of images and texts through which
journalists from opposing political factions in the United States, no
less than in states and cultures around the world, were able to
redefine their social realities. On the other, it was also produced,
distributed and consumed around the world as an entertainment
product, a spectacle of infotainment.
Myfirsttime.com: the Banalisation of News
The web can by no means be blamed for turning the news into spectacle.
Dayan and Katz see the trend as endemic to the media as a
whole and a function of massification. The Olympics, the Watergate
hearings and the wedding of Charles and Diana were all media
events. After Leni Reifenstahl’s Olympia it seems almost irrelevant to
use veracity as a criterion for evaluating such representations. They
become aesthetic, moral and cultural events rather than, or in
addition to, news. The recategorisation also construes other, more
banal, events such as lottery draws and human interest stories such
as Timothy Leary’s death as part of the category. The banality of
news has been accelerated on the web.
The trend encourages disinformation and fraud. In July 1998
media around the world reported that a teenage couple in America
were planning to lose their virginity live on the web. A few
moments’ thought should have alerted editors to the spurious nature
of the claim. However, just as with Matt Drudge’s Clinton rumours,
the story spread like some pernicious weed and took millions of
visitors to www.myfirsttime.com to meet Diane and Mark. The
rigorous checking of the St. Louis Post Dispatch revealed that the site
was owned by a former video pornography retailer whose web broad-