I wasn’t prepared for the backlash.
After 25 years in the TV news business, you would think that I would have a good idea about when a particular story is going to get strong pushback from at least a segment of the audience.
Something political? No problem. I’m ready.
A hot button issue like police misconduct? I can take the heat.
But there are other times when I still feel blindsided by negative reaction – a feeling that is amplified 1000 percent on social media.
Take this recent follow up story I did just one day after we aired a big investigation of a controversial chain of interactive aquariums and petting zoos.
What you see in the comments on my YouTube channel is just a fraction of the wave of angry reaction that rolled in when the same story was shared by my TV station on Facebook.
Some of that backlash was aimed at me, but the vast majority of people commenting were directly attacking the local mom who spoke with me about her 5-year-old son getting bitten by a fish at this hands-on aquarium.
I’m not going to repeat the comments, but it was clear that many viewers did not watch our follow up piece with the context that it was part of a much larger story about a pattern of animal bites, scratches, and other injuries involving guests and employees of this business.
A single kid getting nipped on the finger by a trout? By itself, even the mom and I agreed that it would not be a story – but given what I had uncovered in a six-month investigation, it absolutely was relevant.
My biggest disappointment was that I did not properly prepare myself or the mom who trusted me to tell her story for the potential negative reaction.
I may have signed up for that kind of occasional trash talk, but she did not and she didn’t deserve such a ‘virtual’ beating for simply relaying what she and her little boy experienced.
And this isn’t the first time I’ve been caught off guard. Can you guess what the angry reaction was to this piece I did about child labor on a construction site in the Boston area?
“Bottom of the barrel news reporting,” one commenter wrote. “Maybe you should mind your own business.”
I’m not going to write a long thing here about how we could all benefit from being a little more civil in our conversations online, but this experience underscored for me that we still have a long way to go.