Good, Evil and the Internet - assorted musings

Once again, it's been quite a while since my last post. There are quite a number of reasons/excuses, but none of them really matter. I'm back.

Last week's shooting at Virginia Tech got me thinking, as did the somewhat predictable reaction of the media - mainstream and otherwise. Although I'm a great fan of the immediacy and "democratization" of the fourth estate as offered by electronic and online news services, there are some significant disadvantages, namely the immediacy and democratization.

Allow me to elucidate. Since the earliest days of news reporting, the challenge has been not so much to get the best reportage, but rather the most immediate reportage. Print reporters for newspapers and magazines were, of course, the first to adopt the first-person - or even the second-person ("you are there") school of reportage, with the emphasis on superficial reports of the actual event and marginally more interest in the effect of said event upon the people who witnessed or experienced the event. The creation of what we think of now as the "modern" or electronic media, i.e. radio and television, led to the next logical step: the roving microphone, followed several years later by the "creepie peepie" or handheld (if you can call anything that weighs over fifty pounds handheld) television camera, perpetuated the rush to be first on the scene and first with stories, sound and pictures.

Here's where the first problem lies. When a media organization, whether it's NBC or CBC Radio or the New York Times, first gets its grubby hands on a snippet of information, I would submit that there needs to be someone looking at the material and exercising what we in Canada might tend to call "sober second thought" before publishing or broadcasting it. News organizations in particular live for the scoop, that elusive and largely illusory moment when one organization gets the story out first. Too often, though, the push for the scoop means that the first information about an event is too sketchy to be useful or even meaningful. If there's one thing we should have learned by now about any catastrophe that's being reported online or over the air, it's that the first few reports from the scene are nearly useless and often contradictory. So much for immediacy.

The mainstream media (MSM) seem to be always a step or two behind the man on the street in terms of adopting new technologies that can or could be applied to reportage. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The biggest problem with the democratization brought on by the Information Age is that people begin to think that whatever they publish themselves is The Truth. The great forum that is the Internet quickly degenerates into a bedlam of half-baked theories, pontification and - I love this word - codswollop.

A.J. Liebling, who was himself a better-than-average war correspondent, once summed it all up by saying "freedom of the press is limited to those who own one". God only knows what he would say now, when a free e-mail account and access to a computer can potentially expose any idiot (yes, including me) and his/her thoughts to billions of eyeballs. It is to weep.

The other much-loathed (at least by me) facet of the democratization of news is the ability to instantly spew random thoughts under the guise of "comments". To return for a moment to the event that spawned this screed, the VT shooting, I would turn your attention to the comments that have been posted on any news website that allows them. One would have to search far and wide to find a greater collection of uninformed and yet deeply felt opinion on nearly any subject, whether or not it has anything to do with the actual news event in question. Reading some of the comments to a recent Alan Freeman story about the VT killer made me laugh, shake my head and seethe, not necessarily in that order. Readers' rants on this single and innocuous article ran the gamut from violent anti-immigration diatribes to equally violent anti-Big Pharma rants, to wildly polarized bleating about gun control (pro and con, of course), to pro-American, anti-American, left-wing and right-wing political posturing, to moping about the sad experience that can be life away from home when you're in your late teens.

Here endeth my rant on News and New Media.

I think perhaps the biggest reason why I've been cogitating on the VT massacre is that it's made me reflect on some similar traumatic events that I have experienced. Almost exactly twenty years ago I was a faculty advisor in residence at a US university and was involved in a situation that had many similarities to the VT shooting. But for the intervention of a few key people, most notably the campus police, the school's administration and the student's parents, things might have gone very badly indeed.

In December 1989 I was in France when I started to hear sketchy news reports about a shooting in Montreal. It wasn't until several hours and many frantic phone calls later that I learned that the shootout had occurred at the École Polytechnique, and not at McGill University where a close friend of mine was studying at the time.

Some years later, as a TV news producer, I felt twangs of guilt after assigning a colleague to cover the school shooting in Taber, Alberta, and over the years I worked and talked with a number of colleagues who had covered events like the Oklahoma City bombing, the conflict in Rwanda and the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco.

Mere months ago I heard about the shootout at Dawson College, where my Montreal friend had worked for several years, and where her husband works now.

Like my Blogger nom de plume namesake Voltaire, I often think about the nature of good and evil. Like Voltaire, I reject the concept of using "isms" as a crutch to help explain the universe and the actions of the people inhabiting it. In the end I think both Voltaire and I would agree on a marginally less "big picture" view of things, and work to improve those things over which we have some element of control. We will never be able stop bad things from happening to good people, but for all that we shouldn't stop trying.

Yikes. I got all philosophical and sermon-y there for a moment. Maybe I'll sign off now and post something a little less uplifting later on.