Similarly, a video from New Year's Eve in Toronto shows a crowded McDonald's restaurant cheering "World Star Hip Hop" moments before a young man punches and kicks a pregnant woman who had been yelling at the restaurant's staff. "I feel we're in a generation that laughs at people getting beat up," he told the New York Post. What we once called gangs are now closer to video crews."Įndera, 25, the subway victim, said he was disgusted by the people who filmed the incident. "Some fights are staged for cameras, where it becomes not so much about grievances as it is about staging.
"There are cell phone cameras pulled out at almost any fight," says Ferrell, a sociology professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth who studies the intersection of culture and crime. Such reaction illustrates what researcher Jeff Ferrell calls the merging of "real-life fights and made-for-TV conflicts," which are becoming indistinguishable, especially to young people. Indeed, the young women recording the incident can be heard laughing and discussing the video. That reality focuses on the street events to which O'Denat says his audience can relate, including crime.Įndera, the New York subway victim, was punched in the face and kicked in the stomach for close to two minutes without any intervention from other people on the train. We're not creating it, we're displaying what's going on in today's world," O'Denat said in an interview about his website. "We like to display the reality of today's world: the good, the bad and the ugly.
On a recent day, the homepage included videos titled "The Bigger You Are The Harder You Fall: Big Girl Gets Beat At University Mall In Florida!" and "SMDH: This Boy Starts Fighting 2 Girls & Then Starts Running At Carter High School!" O'Denat, 38, said the sensibility of the "urban media" site and what gets picked to be featured on the home page each day are a matter of showing users what "really goes on the world." The company would not disclose how much it is worth, but O'Denat said it charges anywhere from $650 to $2,500 to post music videos and party promotion videos. Such violent videos, shot by amateurs witnessing or participating in fights, have triggered at least six criminal investigations since April 2011 and highlighted what at least one sociologist calls the normalization of violence.īut crime pays in most of these cases the website nets about 500 million impressions a month, according to its founder, Lee "Q" O'Denat, who started the site as a way to share lesser-known rap music but now envisions a World Star media empire. By them going ahead and wanting to release it and put it on the Internet, I feel they wanted the attention, they wanted to make themselves look like they were brave, they were strong. Why? Because it was one guy against three other people. "It was embarrassing, it was humiliating. "When I found out the video was online, I didn't want to see it," said Brandon White, 20, the Atlanta victim. The videos fit into three neat categories: rap, sex or violence.Īnother egregious example occurred Saturday in Atlanta, where two of the teens accused of beating a young man they perceived to be gay had video cameras rolling during the alleged attack, which was uploaded to World Star Hip Hop and other websites that alerted police and prompted a federal investigation. Rather than onlookers' filming the beat down, victim Daniel Endera later told a reporter, "they should have at least called the cops."Įither way, the highlights make ideal video for World Star Hip Hop, which is a YouTube-like video website where users submit amateur videos that are then selected by the site's staff for publication. 8, 2012— - Cheering and shouting "World Star, baby," passengers aboard an NYC subway train were videotaped in November encouraging three young men to punch and kick a stranger who was hospitalized with injuries.
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