CSotD: Oops … oh well …
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Daryl Cagle on the wall-to-wall coverage of the Newtown shootings. I agree, and I disagree.
That is, the tragedy was certainly news, and, while I don't much like vultures, I'm not a big fan of ostriches, either.
In the old Soviet Union, they didn't report on airplane crashes and other tragedies because they didn't consider one-time odd events to be "news" that was of any benefit. If 5000 airplanes land safely and one crashes, they felt that the takeaway should be that air travel is basically safe.
And you'll hear people say things like, "They never report on the millions of kids who go to school and come home safely every day," but this isn't the Soviet Union — even the Soviet Union isn't the Soviet Union anymore — and I don't think there are very many people who didn't see the shootings as news.
And, while "How do you feel?" is a stupid and intrusive question, I don't have a problem with "How are you doing?" or "What did you see?" when it is asked of an adult. Interviewing eight-year-olds, however, does bring to mind circling vultures.
But there is a difference between doing something insensitive and intrusive in the course of gathering news and publishing something insensitive and intrusive.
Or at least there used to be, back in the days when sometimes over-eager reporters gathered information and wiser, more experienced editors helped shape it into what would be "the news," not just in terms of taste but also in terms of relevance, coherence and accuracy.
Yes, I'm an old fogey. I still believe in gatekeepers. Only I called it "exercising some judgment."
Matt Bors got caught in the "fling it all up on the Internet and sort it out later" school of journalism this past week, when it emerged that one of the 2,800 fans who have friended him on Facebook was Ryan Lanza, the older brother who was incorrectly identified as the shooter at Newtown.
You should read his account of the experience, but he went through only second-degree on-line Hell. What Ryan Lanza has been put through is impossible to calculate.
The excellent NPR program, "On The Media," had wrapped production for the week when all this broke, but they added a segment to their podcast in which Bob Garfield interviewed Jeff Jarvis, the high priest of hip journalism. Jarvis had not just helped spread the false reports about Ryan Lanza, but had added to them by finding and posting tweets that apparently (?) came from the victim of this ghastly error.
In the interview, Garfield suggests that his explanation essentially boils down to "Oops … oh well," and I think that about says it, but the scary and infuriating part, at least to this old fogey, is Jarvis's bland assertion that, if only he had used the word "alleged," his inaccuracies would have been acceptable. (oops) and that this is the face of the new journalism. (oh well)
And he said that after Garfield had suggested the phrase.
After.
In other words, according to Jeff Jarvis (who allegedly enjoys sex with farm animals), you can make up any shit you want as long as you add a vague disclaimer.
And he's probably right, but I hope Ryan Lanza files a few lawsuits, as Richard Jewel successfully did when he was falsely "alleged" to be the Olympics bomber.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure hip (as in "shoot-from-the") journalism has benefited itself by pissing off one of the sharper pens in the sarcasm business.
For the moment, however, Bors is reserving his anger for the John Wayne dreamers who talk of stopping mass murder with public gun battles and who we knew would emerge from this disaster, as they did:
I think we may be at a tipping point, but there is still a lucrative market to be exploited in paranoid Walter Mitty types, and even Bors' own website is not immune to the exploitive trash that pops up when certain tags are used:
That site promises you information on how to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon in any state, even if you don't yet own a gun!
(I know this because I clicked through. There's 30 cents they'll never see again!)
Now, judging from the discussion so far, one of the biggest problems we apparently face in all this is that you're not allowed to do more than one thing. That is, you can either restrict and reform gun laws, or you can expand mental health programs. You can't do both.
Which explains why, when it came to making our roads safer, we had to choose between automobile inspection, licensing of drivers and posting speed limits instead of doing all three.
In any case, it's not time to talk about this yet. Nobody has actually stated what the proper time is between a mass murder and when it is appropriate to start looking for solutions, but several cartoonists have expressed some doubt that we will ever see the appropriate gap between shootings, including Keith Tucker:
Yesterday, Kate Salley Palmer posted the cartoon below on her Facebook page and was promptly assailed with a furious "I was wondering how long it would take you to jump on this" comment.
Yes, how long, Lord, how long? Look at the date in the upper left corner. It was a re-post. She had originally done it in response to the Aurora shootings this past summer.
And Tom Tomorrow has openly thrown in the towel on trying to keep up, posting this one-size-fits-all cartoon:
By the way, this is pretty widely known, but Daryl Cagle maintains a massive website of current cartoons, sorted both by date and by topic. Always worth a visit, but particularly so at a moment like this.
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