Of late, there has a been a drastic uptick in news stories generated by Youtube, TMZ, or other home video/cell-phone video user-generated content websites. The public now has a forum for putting events that would otherwise be missed out to the masses, while it gives lazy news producers easy copy. It seems like a win-win situation.
The problem which arises is that often these videos are posted without context or explanation, so what you see is what you get, and often inferences have to be made to come to any conclusion about the content. This weekend, there was a great example. A video was posted on Youtube of a cop telling 2 black guys they could get out of a littering ticket if they rapped about littering for him. They did their pathetic 2 or 3 lines and left. That's all that was on the website. Civil rights leaders and civic leaders were up in arms, decrying the act as yet another example of racist cops playing up stereotypes. However, with a little research, one learns that the incident last nearly 15 minutes, the men offered up the information that they were rappers, and that the cop told them they would get out of the ticket if they picked up the trash, which they did, then they decided to play it up for the camera and the rap about littering episode that ended up on the web took place, but none of that other stuff is in the video. Of course, none of the follow-up ever makes it to air, you have to find that buried on the station website somewhere, three days later.
The "Youtubing" of the news has added this extra level of subjectivity to the stories. It is a fair resource, but it should be used as a starting point for looking into a story, especially if you want to be considered a credible news outlet. When the story starts and stops with what is posted in a Youtube video, then we have problem.
Another video posted showed 2 little children fighting in a backyard, while a group of adults watched, cheering them on. Now, when Hannity and Colmes decided to discuss this video, they made the assumption that the parents of the two children were among the group, that they were drunk or on drugs, unemployed (possibly unemployable) and irresponsible. It's possible that all of that is true, but there's no actual proof that any of it is, because they are just guessing, it's not in the video. They brought on an "expert", failed to mention his credentials, and he did little more than agree with everything Sean Hannity said (as most of their guests do) and that was the end of the segment. Do we know what actually happened, why the kids were fighting, who the adults were, or where this happened? Nope. But they sure made it sound like they knew what they did.
Making it up as you go along is fine policy for the "War on Terror" or singing sea shanties, but for TV news "journalists", you gotta do better.
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