BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. In the last two weeks, we've looked closely at how the war in Israel and Lebanon has been covered by press around the world in newspapers and on broadcast, cable and satellite television. This week, we logged onto youtube.com, one of the major hubs for citizen video, to see what was happening at the intersection of the digital revolution and breaking news. The answer is, journalistically, not much.

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That, with 390,000-some views, is from the most-watched video under the search term "Lebanon." It's a grainy, static shot of Beirut's sky at night with two distant bomb flashes, more like a thunderstorm than a siege.

This is a surprise. The 2004 tsunami yielded breathtaking footage from tourist camcorders of whole villages being consumed in the tidal surge. Last year, the London subway bombings were reported within minutes via cell phone cameras. Surely more than two weeks of war would produce pictures worth thousands of words dead bodies, panicked innocents, radicalized civilians vowing revenge, but there are very few.

When it comes to the wholesale reinvention of spot journalism, this time around, the nascent vlogosphere has come up pretty much empty-handed. But wait. It may be we were looking for the wrong thing.

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MAN: I want to talk again about Israel and Syria and Palestine. I just want people to know and to tell why that, that keeps happening. That's all.

BOB GARFIELD: That's another of the most viewed video posts from this crisis, a young man posed in front of an olive-green drape, gently suing for piece. Simplistic? Naive? Maybe. But this man's sincerity struck a nerve. Nearly 200,000 people have viewed Peace Guy, and 4,000 of them were moved to post comments, just as 4,000 commented on the static shot of the Beirut skyline

Because the vlogosphere is not just a bunch of amateurs trading videos it's a sort of living organism with the human quality of self-awareness - within a day of the original Peace video, another one popped up, same guy, same olive drape, same vaguely Middle Eastern accent.

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MAN: Israel, the Jew, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, the Muslims, please stop.

BOB GARFIELD: Except it wasn't the same guy. It was a different guy doing a spoof of the Peace video. I'll leave off the punchline on the grounds of vulgarity, but the joke isn't the point. The point is that journalism is not the only means for processing traumatic events. There is also the rest of mass culture. And to surf YouTube is to see the cultural conversation, like time-lapse pictures of a fetus in the womb, gestate before our eyes.

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