There are times when video news footage is best left in the delete folder. For NBC Sports, that time was last Saturday morning, when they first aired footage of the accident that killed Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili at the Olympic games in Vancouver.
My objection to the video’s airing is twofold. First, it was too graphic for my taste, but that’s my hangup. More germane to this blog, the video added nothing of value to the news story.
Media outlets had already reported Friday that Kumaritashvili lost control of his sled during a practice run, flew over a track wall at about 90 miles per hour and then slammed against a metal beam. Some outlets, like The New York Times, also ran still photos of Kumaritashvili airborne before the final impact, with his sled still on the track.
Between the textual description of the accident and the still photography, it was easy to piece together a complete story of how the 21-year-old athlete lost his life. Very much like a motorcycle accident, he was thrown from his vehicle at high speed and ultimately crashed into a hard object. The (tragic) end.
And NBC’s video footage of the accident showed just that — stuff that was already known to those following the story, and nothing that wasn’t described in sportscaster Bob Costas’s preface. It offered no new details or insight on how or why the accident happened. It was gratuitous.
The knocks that NBC took for the video should serve as a lesson to multimedia journalists. Puffing up a news piece with extraneous content has the potential to devalue one’s credibility with news consumers. It shows laziness on the journalist’s part for posting graphic detail without considering its informative value or its usefulness to the overall civic conversation. To some extent, it also insults the consumer’s intelligence, as if bloated content would so easily impress.
Going graphic is especially risky for hyperlocalists, whose consumers tend to take greater ownership in the content. I’ve had to defend my use of certain language and photographs when readers found them too disturbing or offensive, though in my editorial judgment, they were proper vehicles for delivering information and were not gratuitous. Someone’s always going to take offense at something.
Ultimately, the hyperlocalist must decide whether pissing people off does good for the community conversation. If going graphic means doing good, just be prepared to roll with the punches.
Photo of the Olympic cauldron in Vancouver courtesy of Flickr user Marcin Chady.
