Friday, October 17, 2008

An Interesting Dilemma

An Interesting Dilemma

A victim shot back. As the victim tells it, a local TV station came out and badgered her into telling what happened. So we linked to the story. But there's a video clip at the station's website where they give the exact address of where the victim lives, and her name, and of course, her picture. She says that she is now confronting serious problems with break-in attempts by people trying to steal her handgun. (These are obviously people who have not learned from what happened to the last person who tried this.)

She wants us to remove the link to the TV station's story--but there's nothing in the web page that gives her address or even terribly specifically, her address. Only the video linked by the TV station web page does that. (And you can see why I am not identifying which incident this is.)

What troubles me is that for precisely this reason, newspapers usually give only the block number, "in the 1200 block of Pine" when reporting on a crime. So why would a TV station give the exact address of the victim?

The more that the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog becomes metamedia (since it only reports what the media reports), the concerns come up like this.

UPDATE: I complained in an email to the TV station--and they promised to pull down the video, promptly. They had no idea why they put the address in the story, and agreed that it was a mistake.

No comments:

Post a Comment