In Rare Interview, Garry Trudeau On Journos “Smitten” With Twitter

In a rare interview — and his first on the subject — Garry Trudeau gives WebNewser his take on Twitter and the tvnewsers who love to tweet.

Trudeau, the creator of Doonesbury, is the man behind Roland Hedley‘s tweets. Hedley, the comic strip’s fictitious Fox News reporter, recently has become obsessed with Twitter.

Despite Trudeau’s personal affection for broadcast journos (“hey, I like TV news folks — married one [former NBCer Jane Pauley]!”), Hedley’s tweets are intended to lampoon the Twitter craze among tvnewsers. The tweets of real reporters (including Chris Cuomo and David Gregory) are sometimes fodder for thought.

“The technology obviously isn’t inherently silly,” Trudeau tells WebNewser, “it’s just a tool. A lot of serious people are using Twitter towards serious ends…

“But there are also vast numbers of users, including journalists, who are so smitten with the idea of a personal broadcasting system that the absence of meaningful content to broadcast doesn’t seem to concern them.”