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RUSH: Folks, if I might, I ran into something yesterday in the New York Times. This is a little bit off the beaten path because it’s media. Well, actually that doesn’t make it off the beaten path. David Carr, writing for the New York Times, claimed that nobody knew about this story until Wednesday of last week and that this story didn’t become a story until Twitter got hold of it.

This story became a story because of a hashtag. That’s all that happened here. If it weren’t for Twitter, you wouldn’t know about this. That is as bogus and irresponsible as I can think. We’ve been talking about this since before last Wednesday. It’s been all over the place since before last Wednesday. It happened last weekend. So I want to get into that, too, because the fact that…

Carr, by the way, writing for the New York Times, is not all that happy about that. It’s not good. What is Twitter? Twitter is nothing more than a real-time newsfeed of citizens. Who needs the New York Times if you’ve got Twitter that’s making the news? If Twitter makes something a story — and what made it a story? The fact that people outside St. Louis finally found it about it.

Twitter did that, not the New York Times, and that’s not good for the New York Times.

See, the New York Times and the Drive-Bys used to determine what you thought was news. They used to be determine what was news and what wasn’t. Now Twitter’s doing it, and they don’t like it that. Who needs David Carr anymore if a bunch of citizens tweeting each other can make a story, can create a story before the New York Times issues its story on the matter?

So that’s another thing I gotta put over here, because that’s an important aspect of this as well. It constitutes and illustrates a changing media… (sigh) What? Media graveyard, media…? To me, anyway, it’s fascinating. And since it’s fascinating to me, I have the ability to make it interesting to you, which I will. Now let’s see, what was it? I don’t know. It was the New Yorker magazine.

Michael Brown “was eighteen years old, walking down a street in Ferguson, Missouri, from his apartment to his grandmother’s, at 2:15 on a bright Saturday afternoon. He was, for a young man, exactly where he should be — among other things, days away from his first college classes.” That’s how all of this began, not on Twitter, by the way. This all began in the New Yorker after the incident.

That was picked up by all the Drive-Bys.

That was picked up by AP, that was picked up by all the cable news, and that is how the country first learned who Michael Brown was: A gentle giant, minding his own business, walking down the street, just couldn’t wait for college to begin, man! He was just days away from college classes ramping up. Oh, yeah! And then he encountered a white cop, who started firing even after the gentle giant put his hands up and surrendered!

That was the story.

Only it wasn’t, because we later learned that he was not walking from his grandmother’s, he wasn’t where he should be, and he probably wasn’t thinking with excitement about college classes beginning. He had just robbed a convenience store of a box of Swisher Sweets cigars, which is what you use to make marijuana joints out of, blunts.

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