We won’t post that sickening video of these two getting shot. We WILL post this…a beautiful picture of both of them. Let’s remember them at their best. They deserve better from all of us.
That was the statement posted below the smiling photo of WDBJ news reporter Alison Parker, 24, and photojournalist Adam Ward, 27, I saw on Facebook a day after the two were shot and killed during a live television interview the morning of August 26, along with Vicki Gardner, executive director of the Smith Mountain Lake Chamber of Commerce in Moneta, Virginia, who was wounded in the attack. The gunman, whose name I will NOT mention, later killed himself.
Seeing the video, which the killer - a fired WDBJ reporter and disgruntled employee filmed on his cellphone and immediately posted it on his Facebook and Twitter accounts just added one more reason why I not only believe social media does more harm than good. It shows just how sick most people really are if the first thing they can’t wait to see on the Internet is a snuff video showing innocent young people senselessly cut down in their prime.
Call me old fashioned or a grouch who believes 99 percent change is not for the better and won’t embrace social media but I prefer the days of yesteryear when the Internet was not around and such disturbing live-on-air events like President Reagan’s attempted assassination in 1981 and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster were only shown in their graphic entirety on the day they happened and a few days later. The only other times viewers were subjected to such replays was when the news networks ran special segments on the topic.
Today, because of the technology we got at our fingertips all one has to do is point and film and minutes, if not hours later, the brief movie is on the Internet for the world to see. If Facebook and Twitter had been around in 1963, the Zapruder film showing President Kennedy’s assassination would have hit the online social networks hours after the killing, probably while the Secret Service and law enforcement were still investigating.
You may think I am the weird one who, being in my mid-40s now, still browses Star Wars toy collecting and Lego building websites, who think it’s time for me to grow up and get up to date on the day’s current events. I think there is something seriously wrong with that person when they ask me if I saw that unedited video on the Internet of the Israeli pilot being burned to death by ISIS fighters and expresses their excitement viewing it.
So pardon me if I don’t share you people’s morbid curiosity and fascination with death and tragedy. I don’t need yet another disturbing video to remind me of the evil that exists in the world. Thanks to social media we are getting way too much of it on a daily basis.
©9/2/15
-The Comical Conservative
Seeing the video, which the killer - a fired WDBJ reporter and disgruntled employee filmed on his cellphone and immediately posted it on his Facebook and Twitter accounts just added one more reason why I not only believe social media does more harm than good. It shows just how sick most people really are if the first thing they can’t wait to see on the Internet is a snuff video showing innocent young people senselessly cut down in their prime.
As I write this column, the viewing numbers on YouTube upon doing a search for “Alison Parker” or “reporters shot” range in the six and seven digits on several YouTube accounts which replay the barely two-minute interview and aftermath in its entirety.“It will sound horribly callous, but I think that video needs to be out there so that people understand just how awful and real this was. And maybe – just maybe – that would help usher in meaningful discussions and laws on gun control,” said a friend of mine who replied underneath my Facebook post of the picture. “Unless people are confronted with the horrible reality, it allows them to avoid the real issues at play here. I don’t like suggesting it because I know for the families it would be absolute torture but perhaps if we all put ourselves in the victims’ shoes for a moment, it tilts the conversation.”
Call me old fashioned or a grouch who believes 99 percent change is not for the better and won’t embrace social media but I prefer the days of yesteryear when the Internet was not around and such disturbing live-on-air events like President Reagan’s attempted assassination in 1981 and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster were only shown in their graphic entirety on the day they happened and a few days later. The only other times viewers were subjected to such replays was when the news networks ran special segments on the topic.
Today, because of the technology we got at our fingertips all one has to do is point and film and minutes, if not hours later, the brief movie is on the Internet for the world to see. If Facebook and Twitter had been around in 1963, the Zapruder film showing President Kennedy’s assassination would have hit the online social networks hours after the killing, probably while the Secret Service and law enforcement were still investigating.
I see no purpose in watching such macabre images like the 9/11 jumpers at the World Trade Center which can still be seen on YouTube today other than to make one more depressed than they already might be.I just know some of you reading this will say, I am being too hard on social media and that showing such real-life videos of people shot to death helps law enforcement not in only their investigations but also catch the killers.
You may think I am the weird one who, being in my mid-40s now, still browses Star Wars toy collecting and Lego building websites, who think it’s time for me to grow up and get up to date on the day’s current events. I think there is something seriously wrong with that person when they ask me if I saw that unedited video on the Internet of the Israeli pilot being burned to death by ISIS fighters and expresses their excitement viewing it.
So pardon me if I don’t share you people’s morbid curiosity and fascination with death and tragedy. I don’t need yet another disturbing video to remind me of the evil that exists in the world. Thanks to social media we are getting way too much of it on a daily basis.
©9/2/15
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