Race to the Cellar

It’s astonishing to me how two men with a couple of sharp instruments and a twisted interpretation of Islam could throw a nation of millions into alert mode, but that’s exactly what happened in the U.K. this week.

The two murdered an innocent British soldier in the London district of Woolwich in especially unpleasant fashion. Some officials called them cowards, but they weren’t at all. They remained at the scene of the crime and welcomed documentation of what they had done by people in the area with smartphone cameras, finding a willing audience for their insane ideas.

As if this weren’t enough, the footage (funny how we persist in using antiquated terms for digital information) made its way not only onto the Internet, but onto respected news outlets like the BBC. Pictures of one of the suspects holding a bloody meat cleaver were on the front pages of many newspapers.

We often hear the argument these days that information is now democratized, that we’re all reporters, and that we don’t need the traditional “big brother” media outlets to get out the news. In desperate search of ears and eyeballs, the media succumb to this intense pressure to share every single detail of a crime perpetrated by those seeking maximum distribution of it, partly on the grounds that such distribution will happen anyway.

Just to mix metaphors – and I’ve used this one before – we are like 12-year-olds sitting around a campfire in the dark, trying to one-up each other with a more shocking ghost story – and there’s nothing more effective than a ghost story that’s true. The result is, we get desensitized to normal levels of horror, and the bar is raised – or lowered, depending on your point of view.

I hope that some day, as we all get used to playing with our new electronic toys, that editors will be appreciated again. Freedom of speech is precious – but so is the freedom not to speak – or to deny full voice to an infinitesimal minority of individuals whose only goal is to scare us to death.