By Andrew Lam

Pavlos Tsimas is a columnist, TEA commentator, of Mega TV in Athens. He spoke in front of an audience at the Global Forum for Media Development.

(Note, i typed as fast as I could but this is not a full transcript nor a complete word by word rendering of his speech. I just think it’s
worth hearing what he has to say.)

When this [media] congress was programmed and my presence agreed upon I planned to give another talk but then on Saturday night on what we are witnessing is so overwhelming I have nothing else to talk about but the Greek experience of the last 4 to 5 days. A 9:00 in the evening of Saturday a boy was shot dead. For no reason. In cold blood.

I learned about the fact 80 mintues later by email. Turned on the TV set and there was nothing on. Just commercials and nice shows. I turned to the Internet and there in some blogs extensive coverage of the event. I kept receiving messages. The clock struck midnight. People took to street to protest the murder. Victim’s name nobody knew.

Even radio stations were late to get the news.

Thousands of people in the street protesting murder of a boy whose name they didn’t know. Established media have not yet reported the event. TV stations came in a little late. The next day the newspapers did not carry words of the event with the exception some sport papers that carried the story due to late night printing (due to reporting of a football match).

Greece plunged into the deepest crisis in recent memories – people watched fire burning in neighborhoods and saw smashed windows. Radio and TV stations, most of them choose to open the airwaves non stop with call-in shows where listeners expressed themselves and newspapers tried to find out what else to do.

Some background. Picture already seen on TV but it took us a day or two to bring ourselves together and try to grasp and understand and to explain what people were feeling. Meanwhile tens of thousands of young people were signing on facebook sites and organized. They were enraged over the young man’s loss.

Here we are with three different sets of problems.

1.We failed to understand the anxiety, discontent , anger and rage and the sense of lost future we’ve been watching expressed in the street.

2.We failed to understand our own failure. Not just a technical failure. But we failed to understand how such a flammable fabric around us that needed just a spark to [be set on fire]. We failed to see what was around us. We failed – the established media failed. The political world failed. And why did we fail? We find out that many our most established media are disdained rather than trusted by young people in times of crisis.

3.We need to think about the future of our trade in an era when news travels faster [among society] than TV or radio, which only can try to catch up with them. People turn out on the streets before radio and TV can air stories. People react before news were airing on TV.

We talked among us [at the media forum]. We talk in terms of freedom and censorship and the changing technology…. But we need to have to think and talk in term of rehabilitation of our credibility –and our connection with the social environment. We need to understand user-generated content and, not only YouTube, but major interactivity of society.

I’m not an expert. I don’t claim to have answers. I am as puzzled as my colleagues. But especially when you are facing as we are facing with the extraordinary situation like this one – we should start a new social role of the media and our place in this new environment rather than just discuss technological and financial news of our profession.

*Photos by Andrew Lam

For Andrew Lam’s story: go to Letter From Athens: Greek Tragedies and the News Media in the Age of Twitter

Listen to Andrew Lam on WNYC talking about Greece