socialmedian: NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth

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NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth

Source: TechCrunch

Nov 08, 2009

Summary

I’d probably feel slightly smug, if I didn’t feel so sick.

Smug that after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view.

Unfortunately it’s hard to feel smug – hard to feel anything but sadness and nausea – when thirteen innocent people are dead.

I’m talking, of course, about Thursday’s Fort Hood shootings. Better informed and more sensitive commentators than I have written about the massacre itself and what it means for the US army, and in particular for the thousands of Muslim soldiers currently fighting – and dying – for this country. How do you even begin to process the idea of an American soldier shouting the takbir, before mowing down his comrades in arms? On American soil? At the home base of the Combat Warrior Stress Reset program? Yes, that’s definitely one for the experts to parse.

And yet, the first news and analysis out of the base didn’t come from the experts. Nor did it come from the 24-hour news media, or eve

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