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A Suicide Goes Viral On the Internet
Hugh Pickens writes "Will Oremus reports that Fox News showed a grisly spectacle Friday afternoon during a live car chase when the suspect got out of his car, stumbled down a hillside, pulled a gun, and shot himself in the head. As the scene unfolded, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith grew increasingly apprehensive, then yelled 'get off it, get off it!,' belatedly urging the show's producers to stop the live feed as it became obvious the man was going to do something rash. Fox News cut awkwardly to a commercial just after showing his death and after Fox aired the on-air suicide, Smith apologized to viewers, saying, 'We really messed up.' However BuzzFeed immediately posted the footage on YouTube, where it garnered more than 1,000 'likes' in under an hour, sparking immediate blowback. 'Who's worse? @FoxNews for airing the suicide, or @BuzzFeed for re-posting the video just in case you missed it the first time?' posted the Columbia Journalism Review. Gawker's Hamilton Nolan called his site's decision to post the video 'ethical,' because 'it is news' but research suggests that graphic depictions of suicide in the media can spur copycat suicides, especially among young people, and the World Health Organization's guidelines warn against sensationalizing it. Virtually everyone who has studied it agrees that, at a minimum, suicides should be covered with a modicum of sensitivity and context (PDF). 'Of course it's news that Fox News accidentally aired the video. And you can make a good case that Fox was inviting this type of debacle with its habit of airing live car-chase feeds. But Fox couldn't have known that it was about to air a suicide. BuzzFeed, by contrast, knew exactly what it was doing,' writes Oremus. 'That might be good business for BuzzFeed, but it's hard to see the benefit for anyone else.'"
Before anyone starts jumping on Fox News for whatever axe they have to grind with them, please substitute Fox News with "CNN" or "MSNBC" and ask yourself if your vitriol would be just the same.
Gawker's Hamilton Nolan moral compass is way off, but greed has a tendency to do that. It was not ethical to repost the suicide just a cheap very sad grab to profit from it. They could of edited the video and posted a great article with class, dignity etc. but when your moral compass is pointing towards greed well there's the results. I'll stop ranting now :)
in a world full of war for the purpose of promoting democracy where thousands of civilians die from the fighting or aftermath? Oh yah we don't directly see it so its ok.... Out of sight out of mind.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Showing a suicide live on air is, in my opinion, going to far. The feed should have been cut earlier. On the other hand, the local media in my current home town has a policy of ignoring suicides completely and there have been some which would have been reasonably high profile if anyone had known. The suicide rate here is over 3 times the national average but the issue is swept under the carpet in case it takes away from our sunny, happy image and damages tourism. My concern is that it takes away awareness of the problem and leads to fewer resources for those who feel suicidal.
So tired of the "Darwin" meme. It expresses a sense of smug superiority that is entirely undeserved.
strictly from a visual perspective
Unless the viewer is a psychopath (in the clinical sense) that is never how it works.
Grow a pair
Grow up.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Murder is "at best" a form of population control, and certainly involves "Darwin" - the strongest murderers survive. Can we at least not interfere in this one?
Let's face it: suicide happens. You'll get far more suicides happening by not talking about it than you will by revealing the truth to people - even if a few copycat suicides in the immediate aftermath are inevitable. Hint: people don't just kill themselves because they've seen a death, but may simply have seen a method for doing something they wanted to do anyway.
Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries are far less hypocritical with the news than Anglo-Saxon countries, frequently showing gruesome injuries or cadavers. If you're going to report the "news", it cannot just be the things which echo your opinions or which make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.
tl;dr We cannot be as Victoria who pulls down the shutter to her Royal Train when travelling past the Dark Satanic Mills which society has built.
That's because just about everyone thinks suicide is evil, selfish, wrong, etc. Unless you're a pedophile, then do everyone a favor and go shoot yourself.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
But Fox couldn't have known that it was about to air a suicide.
Yes, they absolutely could, and did. A five-second delay was added when the guy got out of his car (why then and not before, and why it wasn't a one-minute delay, I don't know) but for reasons unknown it was, apparently, the in-studio monitors that got the delayed feed instead of the viewers.
Want to avoid this in future? Put a one-minute delay in - at least then it will be obvious if you've mis-switched it. My impression of American news hints that this happens often enough that it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a special circuit added for this sort of thing. Then you've also got the added advantage of not struggling to narrate events as they happen - the gallery can clue you in on what's coming up, and you can even advise sensitive viewers to look away if something surprising but non-fatal happens.
Of course, you could always try not appealing to lowest-common-denominator literal car-crash television in the first place.
<satire>PS Imagine how much worse the outrage would be if the guy had waved his wang at the helicopter.</satire>
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Ironic, isn't it?
Yes, nobody who dies from suicide could possibly have ever contributed anything to the benefit of society.
Let's face it: suicide happens. You'll get far more suicides happening by not talking about it than you will by revealing the truth to people - even if a few copycat suicides in the immediate aftermath are inevitable. Hint: people don't just kill themselves because they've seen a death, but may simply have seen a method for doing something they wanted to do anyway.
This is true, but they've noticed correlations between different ways that suicide is discussed and the suicide rate following it. The suicide rate tends to go down if it is discussed in a way that includes urging people who are thinking about it to get help. However, when someone's glorified for their suicide and no one says to get help if you're thinking about it, suicide rates tend to go up. Of course, that's all just correlation, not causation, but it is interesting.
I watched the unedited footage, it wasn't that bad. In Europe they show traffic accidents in all their horror, burned bodies and all.
I just don't get why this is such a big deal. I loath Fox News because they're the propaganda arm of the GOP, not because of something trivial like this.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I could have been much, much worse it could have been a woman exposing her breasts after she got out of the car. Then Fox News would be in real big trouble.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
That's understandable - people who wanted to do it might be pushed over the edge in the few days after. But, looking again at context, I'm not sure that the statistic is very useful. In the long term, does a graphic depiction of suicide cause people to talk about suicide more? And does that cause people to get help?
Of course things can be horrible for first/third party survivors of the immediate copycat methods, but would they have eventually attempted suicide anyway? IOW does anyone seriously think that not talking about suicide stops people ever killing themselves?
In the long term, it seems better to confront reality rather than to pan away the moment someone might be in danger of revealing it.
The good news is that invoking the Darwin meme doesn't make one immune from it.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
No offense intended. But do you watch all breaking news containing chases? It's at least the impression I get over here in the EU. Loud narrators commenting on some trivial incident. This man who put the gun to his head is quite tragic but the event as a whole is likely to be trivial compared to news items that affect more people. Not criticizing you personally, but have you been conditioned to watch this genre which is produced cheaply? Wouldn't you rather watch a program where people have gone the extra mile to produce valuable content? Without or with minimal commercial breaks? Like BBC does?
(Disclaimer: I'm not a british citizen but I highly appreciate what the BBC does.)
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
The Filter song "Hey Man, Nice Shot" was written about that incident.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Darwin Award is fine. It's just when people use the title where it wouldn't apply. You don't simply kill yourself and get an "award." You kill yourself in some kind of spectacularly stupid way, that results in your accidental death, implying that you just took place in natural selection.
A dude shooting himself in the head is just a suicide.
There is also the question whether this video will influence more people to commit suicide. The Samaritans have a section on their website explaining how to report and dramatize suicides responsibly.
http://www.samaritans.org/media-centre/media-guidelines-reporting-suicide
Hemingway ruined english class for pretty much EVERYONE. Don't put him in the same class as Cobain.
Fixed that for you.
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
That's funny, because the societies that protect the weak tend to be the strongest in the world, while those that persecute the weak tend to end up in the dustbin of history. Perhaps this is because a compassionate society that cares for its weaker members makes everyone stronger. And perhaps mental illness doesn't hurt society nearly as much as the traits of indifference and contempt.
The music industry, in attempting to sell the world "the next nirvana" was what ruined POP MUSIC during the 90's. If that's all you listened to, that's your fault. Kurt Cobain was an artist in the truest sense of the word, caring about nothing other than creating what he saw as art.
Is it compassion to force someone that wants to die to live? Let's look at the person who committed suicide here - he was probably going to prison, and knowing US prisons death might have been a less cruel alternative. So why not let him die on his own terms?
When a society is successful, it finally has the luxury of protecting its weakest members. You may have your cause and effect reversed.
The bad news is that proving your stupidity by invoking brainless memes doesn't cause immediate death,
Hey, maybe those people were just pissed off at society taking their contributions and treating them like dirt, and decided to go on strike in a rather final way. If that's the case, trying to stop the suicide is just strikebreaking.
Turing particularly got the short end of the stick; Van Gogh famously sold only one painting in his lifetime, not counting "sales" to his brother. He also ate his paint and likely wouldn't have produced what he did if he wasn't crazy already.
That's the real story here. Not that he committed suicide, but that he'd rather die than get caught (again?). Every law we have and every rule we enforce is about being a deterrant to going to jail. When death is more attractive than jail, laws no longer mean anything.
They'll want to control how much this video gets around for this reason. It's not about people seeing a suicide, it's about the awareness that death is a more viable solution than jail for many.
It's a video embodiment of "nothing to lose", and that sort of thing scares the people who have much to lose rather shitless and for good reason.
That's funny, because the societies that protect the weak tend to be the strongest in the world, while those that persecute the weak tend to end up in the dustbin of history.
Thats true... of the societies that protect the weak from the strong. That is, from being victimized by the strong.
That is not and never will be true concerning protecting adult people from themselves. In that case, there is no victim. Pretending that there is amounts to treating chronological adults like mental and spiritual infants. The only effect it can have is to cripple and retard their ability to deal with reality, make sound decisions, and actually live life. In fact that would be a living death. It would destroy the joy, meaning, and purpose that life has to offer.
It also makes it easier to institute a totalitarian cradle-to-grave state, because adults who cannot deal with reality and make good decisions need some kind of authority to tell them how to live. That's bad for everyone.
Perhaps this is because a compassionate society that cares for its weaker members makes everyone stronger.
Sometimes compassion requires the fortitude to respect the way people want to live (or not live) their lives, and to restrain your urge to appoint yourself the judge and jury concerning how they should deal with life.
Besides which, if there are no sometimes dire consequences and no bad examples, how do you expect someone to mature into a person who is fully human? You can't do that if you cannot make your own decisions and reap the consequences. No matter how hard you try.
And perhaps mental illness doesn't hurt society nearly as much as the traits of indifference and contempt.
I hate to break it to you but there are plenty of criminals who are not mentally ill (i.e. not legally insane). Some people are simply evil and they understand fully what they are doing. Your compassion is wasted on such people -- they interpret it as weakness and exploitability. In fact the more sociopathic types will let you believe you're doing good so long as they can take advantage of you. You have to have the judgment to tell the difference. There is no algorithm for doing so.
To speculate, did you ever think that by the time the chase ended, perhaps this individual preferred death over being pounded in the ass by Bubba for a couple of decades? Maybe you would have chosen Bubba, but you must admit someone else might not.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Oh, censorship is now okay if you don't like what is shown. This is why DMCA and such exist - because people are willing to compromise free speech.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Oh jeez, you're one of those 53% idiots. Your tendency to swallow political cliches without any sanity checking does not argue for your intelligence. If we had a eugenics comitttee that allocated the right to reproduce, you'd clearly be on the bottom of the list.
Fortunately, the Nazis made that approach to social engineering unfashionable (pretty much their only positive contribution to evolution), so you're free to reproduce. Which is fine with me, because it's perfectly possible for your children to be smarter than you. Just keep them away from the TV set and find someone to teach them a few critical thinking skills.
Is it compassion to force someone that wants to die to live?
I agree with your indictment of the US prison system, but I wanted to zoom out and try to answer this question in isolation.
I can understand the argument that if the person is a legal adult of sound mind, they are due a certain amount of autonomy over their life. However, people who commit suicide are rarely of sound mind. Decisions made in the heat of the moment are often not what you really want.
IMO, it's compassion to help end the suffering of someone who is terminally ill and in pain and wishes to die. It is also compassion to protect a mentally ill person who is at risk of self-harm from the worst effects of their illness.
Whether this case is closer to the former or the latter, I'll leave to a moral philosopher to judge.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
why does it need to be removed? if you don't want to see it - don't watch it.
if you don't want other people to see it - 1. don't post links to it and 2. stop trying to control what other people can and cannot willingly see.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
The problem that a lot of people have with this attitude is that it sounds like you're making excuses why nothing needs fixing. Most people don't turn to crime because they are inherently evil. Most people turn to crime because life dealt them a bad hand.
I find people will find or create whatever perception is convenient for them, with "convenient" meaning they do not have to change their perspective. Bonus points if they get to tell someone else how wrong they are, perhaps with condemnatory vitriol.
To say "nothing needs fixing" misses the point. Governments tend to become tyrannical. That's just a fact and has been a repeating pattern throughout history. Does that mean we just give up and submit to tyranny? No. It means we need constant vigilence. Crime is the same way. No, what people want is some kind of simple, easy, painless, one-shot Final Ultimate Perfect Solution that brings Heaven to Earth. They will remain disappointed.
If you want to talk of attitudes that are tiresome, this "life dealt them a bad hand" nonsense is a good start. I have both read about and personally known people who grew up under terrible conditions. Poverty, child abuse, neglect, gang violence, you name it. Some of it frankly makes me want to puke.
The people fitting that description whom I have met also happen to be some of the noblest and most kind-hearted individuals I have ever known. They didn't use their rough life as an excuse to menace and victimize others. They seem to understand that victimizing others just creates more people who will have the upbringing that they had, and they don't wish to perpetuate it.
So we are left, then, with what you seem to find inconvenient. There is at some point a difference between the criminals who had a rough life and think it's okay to create more victims, and those who had horrible upbringings and became wonderful people in spite of everything. What is the difference then? I say it's the nature of the person. Some struggle against the evil that was placed inside of them and lose. Others are victorious. It's a mysterious thing. It doesn't lend itself to the easy answers we always want. Why is that so hard to accept? We have become so arrogant as a society that we think we can scientifically explain every last detail of the universe?
I love logic. Logic works for problems within its domain. This isn't one of them. This requires a more organic understanding, spiritual if you like, though that's a rather loaded word these days, since people think that's something you get from a book, a leader, or pretty much anywhere except inside yourself.
Like I said, sometimes a rabid dog needs to be put down. You can speculate about where rabies originally came from, but you won't find any ultimate answers.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
To speculate, did you ever think that by the time the chase ended, perhaps this individual preferred death over being pounded in the ass by Bubba for a couple of decades? Maybe you would have chosen Bubba, but you must admit someone else might not.
You make some interesting points, but this "prison rape is part of the punishment" meme is particularly worrisome. First, there is the tacit assumption that prison rape is common, or at least significantly more common than base-rate rape. If true, we are not designing our prisons and guard procedures responsibly.
Next, and perhaps more disturbing, is the idea that this is ok, and even expected. After all, everyone in prison is a subhuman criminal and therefore deserves any treatment they get no matter how terrible, right?
This idea is so ingrained that it's even made light of in comedy movies (Office Space, for one..)
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