When blogs try to make rape funny

When blogs try to make rape funny

The New York Times takes on Gawker's coverage of the scary guy who dressed up like a firefighter to gain entry to a woman's apartment and then assaulted her for 13 hours. From the story by David Carr:

In order to stick out from the clutter online - and Gawker does it extremely well, having had six million visitors in October - Web sites need to not just push the envelope, but rip it to shreds. But, built on knowing cynicism and youthful exuberance, sites like Gawker and Jossip lack the vocabulary for genuine human misfortune. (Full disclosure: Gawker once accused me of sleeping with a source, but it was all in good fun.)

In the Braunstein saga, no detail has been left out in search of a surfeit of laughs, including the name of the woman that Mr. Braunstein was convicted of stalking, a significant transgression of common media practice.

Later in the story, he throws in this line: "But because blogs can be amended or erased, the people who write them tend not to be held to account."

Will be interesting to see if anyone else prints the victim's name with the excuse that's it's already widely known via the web.

I remember very well the day during the O.J. trial when the New York Times started using the tabloids as a source - just like any other source -- in its coverage. Granted, the Globe or Enquirer, or whatever, was getting all sorts of "scoops" about the maid leaving the country and whatnot, but still, I would have preferred the stories referred to them as something like celebrity gossip sheets that sometimes pay sources for info and have been sued repeatedly, accused of making up stories. But the Times - during the first O.J. trial, started treating them as if it was a pickup from the Washington Post.

Those grand newspaper values get bent more often than the mainstream media cares to admit.
- posted by Amy @ 11/14/2005 11:13:00 AM