NewsChannel 8 “Runs Rabid Online”
News Channel 8 is an ABC affiliate in the DC Metro area. They are pretty much either showing reruns of better shows, the traffic report, or really terrible local news coverage. The best thing about the morning show is that Dave Willingham, the traffic guy, seems totally drunk every day. And the weather guy (Ron Riley) kind of looks like John Boland, the SVP of Content at PBS.
So it’s no surprise that News Channel 8 really screwed up their recent story on a Greenbelt, MD trend: ZOMG! Some kids posted RAPZ on TEH INTARWEBS! And the raps are DIRTY!
Aside from the fact that it’s not news that teenagers like dirty rap, the broadcast version of this story is complete hysteria. One woman interviewed says, “Now that you show me this, I’m shaking. My girl is in 10th grade — this is so close to her.” Seriously? Of all the bad things that could happen to one’s daughter in this crazy world, close proximity to rap music is probably not the worst. The rhymes are dirty, homophobic, misogynistic, and occasionally racist, which fits with most of the landscape of contemporary pop culture. It’s just amplified in the hip-hop realm a bit, but it’s no different than the content of the tracks I was secretly listening to when I was in junior high school.
But the straw that broke this camel’s back is the blatant lack of research that went into the story, and this is exposed in the last paragraph of the Web version, the closing lines of the broadcast version. The Web version reads:
The school system says the fight club consists of one clip which keeps getting recycled. It says it reprimanded the students in the video, yet the system admits it is hard to rein in anything once it takes off on the internet. Right now, there’s no way of knowing whether the rants have turned into any physical acts of violence.
The broadcast version also reported that students have claimed to see new episodes of the “Fight Club” videos posted each week. A quick Google will turn up results on YouTube for “Fight Klub” — a series produced by MTV2 that features rap battles between up and coming rappers. Amazing! In fact, after 20 minutes of searching, I cannot find the Roosevelt High School Fight Club videos at all — but I have found dozens of other “Fight Club” videos.
The first tier of the videos one finds are clips from the movie “Fight Club.” These are multitudinous and varied, creepy in themselves. The next tier is ACTUAL fight club footage: People making amateur fighting clubs. If done in a dojo, this is not really even considered weird. And finally there are many, many videos of all sorts of folks battle rapping and calling it “fight club.”
None of these things are mentioned: the fact that this is in no way an isolated incident, that the students are mimicking a television show, and that there is precedent encouraging students to release aggression through verbal expression rather than physical violence (such as dance and poetry groups). This is a series of serious omissions and forces us to confront the unreliability of our local new sources.
