X
Business

My Virginia Tech posts: apologies and clarifications

Yesterday, in my first post on the lack of availability of indexed and searchable video about the Virginia Tech tragedy I started out by writing in part:Evil. Pure evil.
Written by Russell Shaw, Contributor

Yesterday, in my first post on the lack of availability of indexed and searchable video about the Virginia Tech tragedy I started out by writing in part:

Evil. Pure evil. 

The sheer numbers inform a tragedy that is so much more profound than any discussion of the technologies used to stream it to the Web- where workaday Americans can watch it.

Then, in my followup post, I delved into the digital rights management issues. I know now that if I had prefaced that discussion with a re-iteration of my feelings that I had stated in the previous post, my sensitivities to the horrible events would have been clearer. I apologize for not devoting the appropriate sensitivities to these events, and their consequences.

I could have done a better and more sensitive job explaining the overarching belief that I presented in the rest of the post.

My point was it was the urgency of this story, and people needing to see it...including the fact that this horrible event happened in the middle of the day when many if not most readers did not have access to tv and depended on the Internet for access to video news accounts and digital rights was in the way of that. 
 
I have to point out in poll that ran with this column, 75% of you agree. And I'd bet that of those who were looking for video about this tragedy, many searched on services such as YouTube and Google Video- sites that have set themselves up as video portals for pointing to multimedia content that we feel the need to find and watch.
 
Once again, the Virginia Tech tragedy was a moment of deeply personal and of course, national pain and national news- and that for hours, the broadband-Internet-using public's right to know, and to see, was thwarted by digital rights management exigencies/fine print that one might argue ought to have been waived.
Editorial standards