Just the other day, I told a friend via Twitter not to believe what “they” say, that one really can go home again. By that I meant a return to my native New York City after four years of working the hyperlocal scene in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland. I never expected a guy named Lee and his gun-toting, bomb-planting, hostage-taking antics at Discovery Communications would send me back to Silver Spring, if only digitally.
Wednesday afternoon was one long tweet: conversations with friends and former neighbors who work in and around the Discovery building, and retweets of news updates from boots on the ground. Emails and Facebook messages came from larger news organizations, asking for any information I may have had on the suspect or Discovery’s past dealings with him. And I bitched a lot about theories and comments from unnamed sources being passed off as fact (more on that below).
Hindsight being twenty-twenty, and this being the digital age, accolades and criticism of the event’s news coverage surfaced immediately or in real time. Regional news startup TBD.com got well-deserved props for its streaming video and online coverage, with help from its television affiliate WJLA. (Both organizations live under the Allbritton corporate umbrella.) But some of the news coverage (not necessarily that of TBD or WJLA) got gruff from the Asian-American Journalists Association (AAJA), Slate magazine and me:
Was the suspect’s ethnicity relevant? As Wednesday’s events unfolded, the AAJA offered this advice via Twitter: Ethnicity should be reported only when relevant and when that relevance can be explained to the news consumer’s satisfaction. The organization later explained on its website that it objected to “Asian” being the only modifier used to describe the suspected gunman. “It’s doubtful that news organizations would say ‘Black man (or white man) takes hostages.’ This reminder is in that same vein,” the website stated.
I agree, though personally I didn’t see any headlines or tweets describing him only as an Asian gunman. But there was relevance on the hyperlocal level to identifying the suspect as Asian. A lot of Silver Spring residents knew Lee as the village idiot (arguably one of many) who two years ago staged a one-man protest against Discovery Communications and then paid homeless men and women to join his picket line. That same week, he started a near-stampede along the neighborhood’s main shopping strip as he tossed cash in the air to evade his paid-to-picket employees.
Describing the suspect as Asian was germane to the story and a big wink-wink, nudge-nudge to Silver Spring residents. Neighbors knew exactly who took hostages that day — there aren’t too many Asian men with an anti-Discovery agenda running around town — without anyone even saying the dude’s name, and without confirmation from the police (more on that below). Read the rest of this entry »
