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We've all heard loads about the Heaven's Gate tragedy. It was a terrible thing and rightly deserved media coverage but different media covered it in very different ways.
The 'old' media in the US (consisting of TV and papers) looked at the human tragedy but also tried to twist into a Net abuse story where cultists were recruited online. This 'proved' the danger to children online, but the public apparently didn't really swallow it.
Online 'new' media protested at the false accusations being fired at the Net and net users. They saw the tragedy not only of the cultists but of the population being coerced into believing untruths about the Net. This time it didn't work due to the tenuous evidence (or complete lack of evidence altogether as most would now say) and the fact that web-savvy people actually stood up and rubbished the claims.
In the UK nobody actually tried the Net-scare type stories. The cultists raised some cash by designing web pages, that was it. In the UK it seems to be regarded as just another a job and nothing seemed to be attributed to it. Its probably a good thing that people here regard using the Internet as just a job and not a way of life (even though that can be the case) which reduces the 'us' and 'them' mentality which seems to increase the chance of such accusations.
We're just doing our job.
By Jeep
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