No Filter? New Media, 24/7 News And The Charlie Hebdo Attacks

A man clothed entirely in black and masked, walking down a Paris street, armed with a machine gun, sees a policeman lying on the pavement in front of him, injured, doesn’t break his stride, shoots the man in the head, kills him, walks on, gets in a black car, drives off. This is the content of what for me is still the defining and disturbing moment of the recent terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, which proved to be only the start of a rampage across France and into my consciousness. Like many others, I switched on the BBC 24 hour news channel, when I heard of the attack, the intrigue, fear, horror, voyeurism of a live, developing, breaking news event hard to resist. As ever, certainty was hard to find, as speculation was heaped on speculation and pieces of social media content landed on the harried newsreader’s desk and she hastily tried to make sense of it, with hit and miss accuracy. There was an instagram video, looped again and again as the newsreader talked over it. It showed distant figures, someone hiding between parked cars, shouts as shots rang out in the street. Hard to know what it meant. And then the holy grail of real-time user-generated reporting, someone uploaded a video to YouTube of the shooting showing clearly a moment during the attack, which was easy to interpret. However, the BBC only showed a clip – a man jumping in a car, walking in the street armed, dangerous, hidden, but no clear narrative of what he had been doing, what he was escaping from and who he might have shot. The newsreader added on the disclaimer that the video was edited, as the BBC couldn’t show the full clip on TV. No explanation why, just they couldn’t show it. And this is where I made my mistake, crossed the line, let my curiosity get the better of me. The whole scene was shocking, unexpected, but of course grimly compelling, almost like an unfolding scene from the finale of a cheap Hollywood police thriller. I opened another browser tab, the newsreader droning on in the background, searched ‘Charlie Hebdo’ and a number of videos were quickly served up. Scanning the list, I discounted the videos from official news sources and found a clip uploaded by an individual. Pressed play, watched the man walking, just like the BBC version, but here he didn’t get cut suddenly, he continued, he shot, he killed someone, he got back in the BBC-approved getaway car. I felt sick, cold, never having been one to actively seek out the real-world atrocities uploaded to social media – the beheadings, violence, beatings distributed for the propaganda purposes of their merciless perpetrators. The real-time nature of the Internet today, driven by constantly updated social media feeds – tweets, videos, facebook posts has allowed us to bypass the traditional media, who have for decades shaped our view of events and fed us ‘the news’ carefully curated and edited to the tastes and regulations of society. However, we have all bravely, like sofa-bound private investigators trawled the net and seen the hidden photos, the true and false twitter rumours that lawyers have fruitlessly tried to quash, the candid videos, the real deal. Maybe, it’s time to think about whether because we can find what we want at the click of a mouse, we should, because almost a week later I can quite clearly see in my mind’s eye – a stalking killer, a prone figure, a raised hand in hopeless final supplication, the deadly shot. No filter? (c) Barney Durrant 2015