Tom Brokaw Calls Blogs, Video Games "Cancerous"

Back in 1995, I managed a mall-based Software Etc for a year in Omaha, Nebraska -- guess which mall. That's right, Westroads, nestled betwixt some of the wealthiest homeowners (among them, billionaire Warren Buffet) and a bunch of pretty typically middle-class neighborhoods, banks, gas stations, retail stores, car dealerships, hotels, and a sports bar I used to play weekends in a cover band on keys.

On Wednesday, wearing a hooded sweatshirt concealing an assault rifle, 19-year-old Robert Hawkins walked into Von Maur, a two-story department store located on the south side of the Westroads (a ten-second stroll from the store I used to manage, now a GameStop), shot and killed six store employees, two customers, then turned the gun on himself.

There'd been shootings at this particular mall before, mind you. Mostly minor incidents involving kids flashing or firing guns, all attributed to gang-related activity. This was back in the early 1990s, when Omaha actually made the cover of Time magazine for its gang problems, and violent crime (all types) in the U.S. was peaking. For the record, despite all the disproportional and unrepresentative 24-hour cable network news reporting, violent crime (all types) has been steadily declining every year in the U.S. since 1991.

Tom Brokaw isn't the kind of guy you mock lightly, but in a Townhall radio interview with American radio talk show host and neo-conservative evangelical Christian Hugh Hewitt, he reacted to the shooting with the sort of typical generationally challenged punditry that makes game hobbyists like me wince.

HH: Do you not think it?s going to incite other people to try to do the same thing?

TB: No, I don?t. I think?to get back to something we were talking about earlier in general thematic terms, I don?t think we?re doing a very good job about talking about violence in this country, either. You know, Virginia Tech went away. We didn?t have any ongoing dialogue in our communities or on the air about the corrosive effect of violence. It was not what he, what people saw of him on the air that will drive them, it?s what they read in blog sites, and what they see in video games. It?s that kind of stuff that I think is cancerous. And I?m a free speech absolutist, but I think that at the same time, we have to have free speech in some kind of a context. And part of that context is a discussion of the possible effects of it.

I'll leave the video game comment alone, because it's broadly dismissive and idiomatically ignorant enough that I'll just sound cruel going after a 67 year old South Dakotan with an enviable public and industry awards list. And he's not wrong in his assessment of way the country has a horrible track record when it comes to dealing with its weirdly hypocritical stance on violence (violence in games is fine, for instance, but sexual themes and even partial nudity are big no-nos).

But the blog comment just sounds like an angry, resentful, old-media-journalist dig. Sure, blogs are often un-sourced, are frequently little cults of personality or echo chambers for cynical albeit occasionally amusing blathering, and they can certainly sound or seem to function as "mob-like." But they're also tremendously effective ways of applying (increasingly) democratic pressure to a monolithic, deleteriously corporatized informational superstructure, a means of confronting a mainstream media that's increasingly less informative, insightful, carefully sourced, and journalistically competent than its newer, somewhat hostile peers. In Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel's The Elements of Journalism, the authors in fact argue (and I agree that):

Journalists are under intense scrutiny from bloggers, and many companies are struggling to integrate their online operations into the newsroom without lowering standards of verifying and reporting information. Much of that pressure is healthy. Clear away the rhetoric and animus of those who yearn for the annihilation of traditional journalism (the hated "MSM," or mainstream media) and journalism will be better for the scrutiny that the blogosphere offers.

[Thanks, GamePolitics]