The week’s biggest news out of the DC metroplex didn’t come from the Capitol or the White House, but Silver Springs, Maryland, where an environmental activist stormed the Discovery Communications building, took three hostages, and demanded broadcast concessions from the Discovery family of channels (Discovery, DISH 182; Military Channel, DISH 195; Animal Planet, DISH 184; TLC, DISH 183, and others.)
Screengrab of Lee’s website from ecopolitology.org
The standoff ended with the death of the perpetrator, James Lee, and probably several sleepless nights to come for hundreds of staff members, some of whose children were in the building’s corporate day care center.
With the nation’s nerves badly frayed from an economic death spiral, a whopper of a hurricane in the Atlantic, BP workers still in the Gulf of Mexico, and a major election on the horizon, the general public is likely further exhausted by Lee, who was reportedly influenced by former Vice President Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. As terrorism goes, his demands were curious: Instead of cash, cars, and diplomatic immunity, he wanted “broadcasts of forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation,” a moratorium on programs “glorifying human birthing,” and “solutions for unemployment and housing.”
In a way, it was the first manifesto of the digital generation; it name-checked specific channels and programs, suggests a game show, and included a “WTF.” More to the point, the incident is a marker in how current events unfold. Some Americans rushed to their TV sets, but many more first heard about, and then followed, the developments online.
While some terrified students were able to phone their parents and local news stations from inside the building during the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, a little over a decade later, the Discovery Communications story first broke on Twitter. Employees grabbed their BlackBerrys; one even snapped a photo of a man carrying a gun from an office window. Mainstream media outlets lagged behind as both rumor and fact zipped from coast to coast. Some witnesses took video and loaded it directly to the ultimate information disseminator: YouTube (“Getting no work done,” one uploader said over the sound of frantic background typing.)
The sad irony is that Discovery Communications broadcasts many programs which encourage an eco-mindset; Planet Green’s programming, along with its partner website, treehugger.com, is dedicated exclusively to environmental concerns, politics, and lifestyle choices. But even though the crisis was dramatic, this was no reality show. It was realness, showing– in both fear and relief.
