Proverbial

While I’m opposed to the death penalty on both moral and practical grounds, I can’t feel sorry about Saddam’s execution. And this might be a good story to tell those who think his death will only worsen the insurgency in Iraq.

In fact, the overall effect of his death is the only thing about this whole affair that seems remotely interesting to me. At this point, one positively good effect can already be seen: knowing it could do nothing to prevent footage and pictures of the execution from quickly hitting the web, and thus having to deal with the ethical challenge of how to properly report it, a good deal of the mainstream media decided to use blogs and such to present their decisions to its audience.

On the one hand, they make themselves all the more open to criticism and finger-pointing by bloggers and such. And because of that, on the other, they can claim they’re being more transparent and open about the way they report things. Chris Anderson must be quite pleased with it.