BROOKE: And I’m Brooke Gladstone. We’ll start this show with a brief comment. There was another shooting Wednesday, more innocent people killed. It’s not our intention to focus on dead journalists; in America, gun violence erupts every day. But the murder of TV journalists Alison Parker and Adam Ward presents a new-ish wrinkle -- because it happened live on WDBJ-TV, Roanoke, Virginia, and video of the event was posted on Facebook by the shooter himself. The killer’s perspective, as it were, eerily like the player’s view in a first person shooter game. It’s raised some questions: Are video games culpable? Come on, games don’t make murderers. Is the allure of social media somehow to blame? No. No. No.
When information tools are available to everyone, anyone can use them. That’s how we know about Walter Scott’s murder by an officer in South Carolina, and Eric Garner’s death after a police chokehold in New York. Our cell phone footage shows us who we are, and reminds us what we could be. Often the reflection is monstrous, but can anyone argue that blindness is worse?
Yup, lunatics have cameras, but more important, the rest of us do, too.
What else is there to say?
