Peter Griffin: Web carries unfettered diet of gruesome death

COMMENT

So this is the world we live in. The United States television news networks count down the hours while a man waits to see whether his captors will deliver on their promise to cut his head off.

They do and the TV news hounds pile on to the front lawn of the dead man's family to get the reaction.

Then a group of Invercargill schoolchildren watch footage of the beheading itself and sit around debating what it means.

It's the real-world equivalent of the direct-to-video movie and it's all thanks to that increasingly immediate medium - the internet.

Whether the kids watch the macabre event at school or at home is largely irrelevant. The point is, a hundred copies of the Paul Johnson and Nick Berg beheadings are just a Google search away. Which means a lot of people want to watch them.

The reason "Paul Johnson" was a heavily requested Google search in the week following his death is that we are no longer content with what the mainstream media see fit to give us.

We want to go further, and a whole web subculture has sprung up to serve our tastes.

In one sense this is empowering. Look at the rise of the web log. Remember Salaam Pax's updates from Baghdad during the height of the war in Iraq? They offered a rare civilian perspective.

And what about Harry Knowles, the portly red-haired guy who runs the film news and reviews website Aint It Cool News.

During the making of the The Lord of the Rings, he was scooping Variety and the Hollywood Reporter with his website updates on leaked news of the film shoot's progress. In the end, Peter Jackson flew Knowles down to have a look round for himself.

With bloggers covering the US election build-up now getting their own media accreditation, these writers are competing head to head with the papers and TV networks. They aren't subject to the same editorial scrutiny, which can be worrying.

But it goes beyond blogging. These days everyone wants to be a Matt Drudge, unveiling their own angle on a story, pushing their own line.

The political situation in the US has generated a host of websites, put together by people who claim to be passionate about getting the real story out, but who often end up just putting another spin on it.

Sometimes these alternative views are issued with little regard for defamation law, publishing standards or good taste.

One website, heavy with adult material, promises to post "everything the mainstream media are keeping from you!"

The Coalition for Free Thought in Media is, according to its creators, "formed to represent the little people, in journalism and media".

"Our main goal is to expose the truth about the USA/Patriot Act and to fight against war and oppression everywhere."

There are sites such as Conspiracy Planet, which claims to be "the alternative news and history network".

There's the Smoking Gun, which ferrets around to find court documents and police mugshots relating to major, usually celebrity-related cases.

The Gun tips its hat not to the mainstream news photographers, but regular public servants with a willingness to leak documents.

"We're talking about the countless clerks, cops and sheriff's deputies who handle the impromptu photo shoots with the rich and famous who have landed in the pokey," its editors claim.

Often the line between providing a genuine alternative view and appealing to voyeurs is blurred.

A popular website specialises in gathering photos taken at the scenes of murders and freak accidents.

A picture of a man who fell off his motorcycle; a snap of a man who jumped to his death from a tall building in China, landing on a taxi - the sort of stuff you won't see in the paper.

Yet another website specialises in freakish medical conditions. Click here for "Fly larvae in a man's gums" or "2 people with shrunken heads".

Noted media critic Neil Postman thought we were "amusing ourselves to death" with TV. What would he have made of this little collection on the internet?

We can't depend on the internet providers to dictate what should and shouldn't pass through their servers.

There is just too much information flying round to go down that path.

The media have to be more responsible about pumping up stories that play out uncensored online. We can't stop the dissemination of semi-edited stuff via the internet and nor should we. A lot of it embodies what the free speech advocates fight for.

But we do have to become more savvy as consumers of that information and learn how to edit ourselves.

We've got to be extremely careful with anything that we pick up on the web.

As far as the macabre stuff goes, we all know our limits.

I certainly know mine, which is why I gave the beheading videos a miss.

When I was about 13, a schoolfriend and I managed to get hold of a tape dubbed Executions.

It was real footage of brutal executions being carried out - mainly in Middle Eastern countries.

It wasn't any more gruesome than the Reservoir Dogs-type movies we revelled in at the time. But it was different, it was real.

Watching it was supposed to be exhilarating, but it wasn't.

It put a downer on our school holiday break.

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