 On Point Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes his On Point column most weekdays. He is also an author and freelance writer. Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com. |
Carroll: Media in the middle
I’ve never seen one of those videos featuring a beheading from Iraq — never will, either, if I have anything to say about it. But my taste isn’t shared by all. Some people who aren’t voyeurs or sadists consider those videos a way to plumb the evil of radical Islamists. If it helps them that way, more power to them.
Are they being used by the fanatics who filmed the murders? Of course not — any more than those who saw the photos and videos taken by Seung-Hui Cho are tools of his ambition.
In his Rocky column Saturday, media critic Dave Kopel wrote, “It would have been better if all the Denver media had refused to print the posed photos anywhere, and also refused to link to his videos from their Web sites.” If it was wrong for the Denver media even to provide links to the material, then it was obviously wrong for others to do so, too. Kopel, along with a surprising number of other critics this past week, argues for a total blackout on the package Cho sent to NBC News. The rationale: preventing copycat crimes and in deference to the victims’ families.
Now, it’s one thing to demand the media “keep that stuff out of my face” — to banish Cho’s posed pictures from the front page (and even inside pages) and decline to air any video. I might disagree — OK, I do disagree — but the critics offer admittedly strong arguments for limiting the killer’s exposure.
What I don’t get at all, however, is the eagerness of some to block even self-initiated access to the material on the Internet, thus leaving the public at the mercy of descriptions from network executives, forensic psychologists or the FBI.
Sorry, but this member of the public doesn’t want to depend solely on elite guardians to characterize the material for him. The era when that was the norm is over — or at least it’s on the ropes thanks to the way the Internet tends to cut out the middleman.
I heard only a few seconds of Cho’s lunatic rants, by the way, and have no desire to witness the rest. But it’s important to me to know that in the event of a serious public dispute over something in it, I could settle the matter for myself in a matter of a few computer clicks.
Ballot ballet
Once again I’ve cast more than a single ballot in a local election. And once again it’s given me an uneasy feeling about the integrity of mail elections.
On Monday I dropped off three ballots at the Wellington Webb building in downtown Denver. It’s legal to mail or deliver a ballot that isn’t yours, of course, although you have to sign in and record the number you produce in person.
But how would they know how many ballots I’d dumped in a trash bin out back?
What if I’d promised to deliver a dozen ballots from a nursing home where a relative of mine resided — saving each voter the escalating postage — and then quietly discarded those I suspected disagreed with my own electoral choices?
There are simply too many points at which a mail ballot may be in the control of someone other than the voter or the office tabulating the results. And one of these days we’ll discover that it matters.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.