The London underground bombing, the UCLA taser fiasco and the Michael Richards racial rant, all have something in common. They were all captured on video with an amateur’s cell phone. In this day and age of e-mail via Blackberry and Web videos galore, it seems that the state of art technology has found its way into everyone’s hands. Whether these new devices are beneficial or not is debatable. But one thing is for sure: Cell phones have officially become the newest way of capturing breaking news.
Take the July 7 bombing of the London underground. The horrific terrorist attack, which occurred during rush hour on that summer morning, began at 8:50 a.m, when three bombs exploded within 50 seconds of each other. The bombs went off on three separate subways in London’s underground, followed by a fourth bomb that exploded on a double-decker bus almost an hour later. With 52 civilians dead and hundreds wounded, it was vital that news stations divulge every possible detail of the event while maintaining a bipartisan attitude.
That’s where the cell phone comes in. Some videos, shown on every major network news station, from BBC to CNN, showed blurry images of Londoners covered in soot and dust. Other videos showed lines of people walking up a dark alleyway, presumably the London underground. One especially harrowing video depicts the actual explosion of a bomb detonating a few hundred yards before the camera. As you can see, the videos captured via cell phones of the London bombings helped us all get an inside look at what really happened that fateful summer day.
Of course, we all remember the now infamous UCLA tasering incident on Nov. 14. It was around 11:30 on Tuesday night and Mostafa Tabatabainejad was getting ready to leave UCLA’s Powell library after a long night of studying. That’s when things got ugly. One of the service officers on duty asked for Tabatabainejad’s student ID and he unfortunately failed to produce it. The service officers then told Tabatabainejad that he must leave the library. When he did not immediately exit the building, the University of California Police Department (UCPD) was called. That’s when the tasering began.
In the cell phone produced video, one can hear Tabatabainejad’s pain as he screams in agony. Eyewitnesses said he was tasered at least four or five times, once while handcuffed, to get him to shut up.
The video is shaky, raw and terrifyingly real. It is horrific to imagine such a blatant act of violence for simply failing to present a student ID. Without the video, it is highly doubtful that the debacle would have caused such controversy.
And last but not least, there is Michael Richards’ sickening racial tirade against an African-American heckler in Hollywood on Nov. 17. Without the video, no one would have seen Richards’ bizarre antics on stage, the way he hollered and spit out his profane, vulgar words of racism and hatred.
It is evident that cell phones are changing the way news is discovered around our nation and across the globe. There’s no such thing as “word of mouth” anymore. It’s all about “seeing is believing,” and that’s a fact. With visual aids to ensure believability, scandal after scandal is being exposed, all by innocent bystanders, who do not know what they are about to witness. And all of this is thanks to that little thing called a cell phone.
