The video: EMS crew gets the finger (actually two). STATter911.com gets the rest of the story. Now Dave wants to know should we even run it?
Previous discussions of emergency scene photography & videography on STATter911.com can be found here, here, here & here.
My friend Rhett Fleitz posted the video above on his site FireCritic.com yesterday. I can’t say I blame Rhett for doing so. It is the type of video that most of the fire/EMS bloggers would run (including me) because it’s unusual and is probably of interest to our audience (and judging by the more than 100 thousand hits, it is isn’t just fire and EMS people interested in this one).
Rhett wrote the following:
Bonus Video of a patient at a house fire giving the medics the finger! This freakin guys is hilarious! I don’t have a clue what is going on here, other than firefighting is not one of them!
With Rhett not providing any background, I was curious about the story behind it. So I did a few minutes of research.
It turns out the fire occurred in January of this year on Stewart Avenue in Nanaimo, British Columbia. As you will hear in the news video below, the man being wheeled out and putting on a bit of a show for the crowd is physically disabled. Firefighters found him in his cottage on the property and carried him to safety (seen on the video). Firefighters say they didn’t put water on the fire immediately due to a downed power line at the burning home.
To me, both of these videos are very interesting in that they bring up a lot of news judgment and ethical questions for both traditional media and those of us in the blogging world. I will admit, now that I know the man is disabled (something I am sure Rhett didn’t know), I feel a little dirty about running it. I am sure I will rightfully get criticism for posting it anyway, but my reasoning is that I want to illustrate this issue (some will call that a convenient excuse and I wouldn’t blame them a bit). But I don’t think running a video on my blog that is all over the Internet will necessarily cause any additional harm (more pitiful justification by Dave).
Maybe I have lost my hard edge since leaving TV in June, but I am even questioning if I would I have run the video in the news story of two firefighters carrying the man to safety. I know news directors who, upon learning of the disability, would be concerned about the man’s dignity and ordered that it not air or that we cover up the man’s face. At the same time photographs and video of firefighters rescuing people have long been a staple of the news media and are some of the most powerful images many of us have seen. The dignity of the victims in those pictures is usually not a topic of discussion.
In previous postings (see links above) many of you think there should be restrictions on showing stuff like this, or wrongly believe it is a HIPAA violation (if this was in the U.S.). Others have pointed out the news media often sanitizes things too much and we should show the public what it’s really like. Usually I fall in the “show the reality” category. The “reality” for fire and EMS bloggers could include video of a guy shooting the bird to an EMS crew (something TV news isn’t likely to show).
Let me be clear that I absolutely defend the right of both photographers to shoot the video and to air or post it. The same goes with what Rhett and I have done. To me the question of, “Can you do this?” isn’t even up for debate. It’s a question of should we.
With 38 years in the news business I have had to make a lot of these decisions. Some are easier than others. This one has me a bit stumped. What do you think?
