August 11, 2004
if it’s on the internet, it must be true
A San Francisco trio filmed a fake beheading “as an experiment to find out how quickly erroneous information could be spread by the Internet.”
Apparently, the answer is: pretty damn fast.
They injected the film into the kazaa network where it smoldered for a bit until it was picked up by an Arabic website. From there, the Associate Press and Reuters picked it up and without verifying any facts, proclaimed that yet another American had been beheaded in Iraq.
Sloppy journalism knows no borders it seems. I’m not surprised that some janky Arabic propaganda “news” site posted the clip without bothering to find out if it was real or not, but that both the AP and Reuters just accepted some random story out of a questionable site is somewhat disappointing. Maybe I’m too idealistic and naive, but I expect a news source to be primarily focused on providing news to me as opposed to selling advertisement space and winning ratings for itself. Silly me.
The other very disturbing aspect of the SFGate article is the quote from FBI spokesperson LaRae Quy. Apparently, the FBI decided it needed to investigate the trio, for what, I don’t know.
“It’s a very unusual situation,” Quy said. “It may come down to freedom of speech, and we’ll defer to the U.S. attorney’s office here on that. The question is: At what point does he step from freedom of expression into something that makes a mockery out of the pain suffered by families that have had beheadings of loved ones?”
Hey FBI guys — he took that step as soon as he pressed the little “record” button on his camcorder. Guess what? That’s the WHOLE FUCKING POINT of the 1st Amendment. Last I heard, offending people was not a constitutional offense.
Martin and Kirchner expressed regret for any harm caused by their hoax. “If any families, such as the families of Daniel Pearl or Nicholas Berg have been caused undue stress, we apologize,” said Kirchner. “It’s not our fault. It’s the media that made this real. This was intended to be a ridiculous little parody.”
Exactly.
