And I bet if a small independent such as Rocketboom had published, there would be a hell of a lot more cirticism towards you than NBC will get.
Winer has always wound me up, I cant read his stuff, its bad for my blood pressure. I was pissed off at the mainstream medias coverage of this tragedy before this new 'angle' emerged. I picked the wrong day to get a satellite dish, ugh Sky News here in the UK were running a story early on that showed various victims blogs/social networking spaces, and the grieving messages, and I dunno, the tone of the piece made it seem sick to me. The UK news networks generally went into the same constant emergency quack mode that they go into when there is some terrorist attack or something in the UK. Left with so much airtime to fill, thousands of words of crap, ill thought out drivel and phoney expert opinion fill the airwaves. Then the politics emerges, people form a position which suits their causePlenty of measures of limited use will be proposed, kneejerk reactions and jerks in general will be everywhere. Visuals that have a powerful effect on people will be shown again and again and again, just as with 9/11. The media as an amplifier, they will zoom in to certain things and amplify, amplify, amplify the psychological damage. At the same time they will talk about the need to help mend this damage. But must be careful of what the agendas are of those who call for the media to act with more restraint and withold stuff. Whenever some military scandal broke, Rumsfelds words always made it seem like it was the media that was the problem, not the events their images covered. This was especially true with the Abu Graib photos. And lets not forget the criticism he levelled at networks like Al Jazeera when they showed stuff the USA didnt like. As for whether this stuff will lead to copycat stuff, well there is no doubt humans do copy behaviour from eachother, but once you go down the path of trying to prevent this, you end up having to suppress so much information, where do you draw the line? For a start we can include all the debates abotut films, tv, computer games & music encouraging violence. We could argue that books that go into huge detail about the lives of serial killers, could encourage copycats. Anyway who is to say this killer did not copy someone else? Didnt the Canadian school shooter from the last year or so, post photographs of himself posing with knives and guns on a social networking site? As I recall the media poured over every detail on his site, what music he liked. And they suggested that he as influenced by a computer game about columbine. In the 'War on Terror' there are some very similar issues. If terror attacks are carried out for the psychological impact they have, then doesnt giving them lots of coverage, help the terrorists and encourage others? Im interested in defending videoblogging from and phoney arguments that somehow tars all videobloggers with the same brush. But I dont want to go too far in suggesting videoblogging has never crossed paths with death videos. Before mosstly anybody though to call themselves a videoblogger, a video of Daniel Peal getting his throat cut was on the net. Various videos of Iraq insurgent activity, beheadings, the hanging of saddam, and many other terrible things have happened since. Atrocities carried out in other warzones, such as Chechnya, had also been distributed on the net for many years, as had various other sorts of slightly less violent propaganda. Most recently we have been told that Mexican Drug gangs are using youtube to intimidate eachother and post videos of torture and murder. So I repeat my belief that as video on the internet becomes a normal human activity, it will come to show us all the things that humans are capable of being and doing. Things and people we are only used to reading about, or being heavily filtered, will enter our minds through our eyes and ears as never before. There is and will continue to be much joy and much horror nd much else in between. Steve Elbows --- In [email protected], andrew michael baron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Apr 19, 2007, at 12:23 PM, Heath wrote: > > > I only see and hear people saying how the MSM is > > covering it is wrong. So I ask out to the group, you are the news > > director you have the ablilty to shape how this story is told, how do > > you do that? > > If the guy sent the package to Rocketboom, I wouldn't publish it. > > I would hand it over to a committee to decide what to do with it > based on academic reasons as opposed to economics. > > > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] >
