The Ongoing Impact of Kony 2012, Fact Checking Gossip and More
On the Media
WNYC Studios
4.6 • 9.1K Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2012
⏱️ 52 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Remember |
| 0:07.9 | Coney 2012? The record-breaking viral video by a group called Invisible Children about a fugitive |
| 0:14.9 | warlord who conscripted child soldiers and murdered at will. You must remember. It was only six weeks ago. |
| 0:22.5 | Posted online Monday, the video Coney 2012 by Thursday morning had 20 million views. By Friday |
| 0:29.5 | morning, it was more than 70 million. The Coney 2012 campaign has become a social media |
| 0:35.1 | phenomenon. If you look at Twitter this morning, you can see that there are literally thousands of people on here just this morning posting about Coney 2012. |
| 0:44.0 | Is it possible that the most powerful army today is not military, but a collection of celebrities, students, and ordinary people trying to transform human rights around the globe. |
| 0:55.0 | Well, maybe not. Invisible children exhorted the millions of people who watched the video |
| 1:00.6 | to fill the streets and paper the walls with posters of the brutal Ugandan rebel on Friday, April 20th. |
| 1:08.1 | It was to be a global cry of outrage, but it turned out to be more of a squeak. |
| 1:14.0 | Only a handful of those people were actually mobilized. Invisible Children says its effort has been |
| 1:20.3 | an unqualified success. Coney is still making headlines and world leaders are taking action. |
| 1:26.2 | Ash Harwood wrote in the Council on Foreign |
| 1:28.5 | Relations Africa in Transition blog that there's some truth in that. Ash, welcome to the show. |
| 1:34.2 | Thank you very much, Brooke. Okay. So in a recent piece you wrote for the Council on Foreign |
| 1:37.7 | Relations, you mentioned Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece about social media, which he said was |
| 1:42.1 | highly overrated as an instrument of social change, |
| 1:45.3 | that it was an easy, no-risk outlet. So in this case, he seems to have been right? |
| 1:51.1 | I think he was right. People have referred to this as slacktivism, which basically means that |
| 1:55.9 | it's a low-risk thing that makes you feel good about yourself. But I guess my first question is, |
| 2:00.7 | what can you really |
| 2:02.1 | do at the moment? Go to Uganda and search for Joseph Coney? Well, my argument would be, let's start |
... |
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