News

In the age of 24-hour news television, it isn't uncommon to see video clips of people dying. In most cases, they are soldiers in a battle halfway around the world or people caught in an earthquake or some other natural disaster. The victims tend to be nameless and, for the most part, faceless.

Thanks to the proliferation of cellphones and inexpensive video cameras, however - combined with popular Internet video-sharing sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion and LiveLeak - death now comes closer than ever.

In the case of Robert Dziekanski, the Polish man who died after being tasered by the RCMP at the Vancouver airport, it is only a few feet from the camera lens.

Mr. Dziekanski's face is clearly visible in a video recorded by Paul Pritchard, a 25-year-old Victoria resident who was in the airport that night. By now, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, have seen Mr. Dziekanski die.

Some no doubt watched his death the old-fashioned way: on the evening's TV news. But just as many, if not more, have watched it online - whether on news websites such as The Globe and Mail's, where a copy of the video has been posted, or at dozens of other locations on the Internet.

Hundreds - perhaps even thousands - of people likely watched Mr. Dziekanski's death on YouTube, until the video was removed due to a "terms of use violation" (which usually means that whoever uploaded it didn't have the right to do so).

The Internet being what it is, however, copies of the video are still easy to come by. There are several versions still available on YouTube, uploaded by other users or under different names, and at Google's own video portal.

There are also copies online at other sites such as AOL and LiveLeak (where the video plays full screen). In some cases, the clips are copies of the original, and in others they are recordings of a TV news broadcast.

Cellphones and handheld video cameras have given us up-close-and-personal views of the deaths of Saddam Hussein - as filmed by an official who was present at the Iraqi dictator's execution - as well as rapper Lisa (Left-Eye) Lopes, whose car crashed while one of her friends was videotaping her.

The phenomenon itself isn't new: the video of Rodney King's beating by Los Angeles police hit the news in 1991. But it is becoming more prevalent, because of the spread of cellphones and video cameras, and the clips themselves spread faster now that large numbers of people have high-speed Internet access.

In many ways, cellphones and video cameras have turned bystanders such as Mr. Pritchard into news correspondents, or what some have called "citizen journalists."

Alfred Hermida, who teaches multiplatform journalism at the School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia, wrote on his blog that the taser video is "an illustration of the power of amateur reporting."

"The tools to report on the world around you are in the hands of ordinary citizens," Prof. Hermida told the CBC in an interview (a YouTube version of which he posted on his website).

Since many websites, including globeandmail.com, allow readers to post their comments on news stories, there is also a much larger forum for people to express their opinions about deaths such as that of Mr. Dziekanski.

Comments on the globeandmail.com story numbered more than 1,000 by day's end yesterday, including one that said "I am ashamed to be a Canadian," and another that said "mere words cannot convey the utter disgust I feel toward the RCMP." Others called the video "a sickening display" and an "ugly stain" on the RCMP.

In comments on a story at the CBS News website, one reader wrote: "We assume things like this will happen in the police state called the United States of America. Somehow I expected better of Canada."