Christopher Lao, The Media, and Cyber-bullying

I admit that I laughed when I saw the video of him driving his car into the deep flood. It was pretty obvious that the flood was deep because there were no cars passing by the area, and yet he proceeded to still drive into it. I even re-posted the video, which I believe was taken down by the original person who posted it because I couldn't find it on my wall when I wanted to delete it; even clicked Like on the page created for Mr. Lao, which was wrong of me to do so, so I eventually clicked Unlike and decided not to be part of the cyber-bullying.

Mr. Lao's accident was an act of stupidity, but it was not entirely his fault that he is now "famous".

First of all, the network's reporter shouldn't have interviewed him. It was an unwise move because he risked humiliating the person on national TV - which is exactly what happened. Plus he appeared to have provoked Mr. Lao to continue talking which then turned into ranting. He should have just interviewed those who helped Mr. Lao push his car out of the flood.

Secondly, the network should not have approved the report. In my opinion, this network is slowly becoming notorious in broadcasting "high-risk" reports. I feel that they think that as long as they have something to show on TV, it's all fine.

Last on the list, well, is Mr. Lao. He had a choice not to be interviewed, not to publicly humiliate himself even more. He would have been anonymous. And yet, he proceeded and had himself shown on national TV and ranted about him not being informed, that it was the government's fault that there was no roadblock before the flood, even blamed the people on the street for not informing him. For me, that was him digging a deeper hole of humiliation.

I'm not including the government here, because it's very typical of Pinoys to blame the government for everything, and it's has become overrated. Honestly, the government can't take care of every single little problem we have because they have much bigger and more important situations to handle other than putting roadblocks to inform motorists that there is deep flood ahead. I mean even MMDA is depending upon the Filipino citizens for flood reports because they simply could not be everywhere.

I understand that Mr. Lao, even before the flood incident, has been stressed because he is currently reviewing for the bar on top of him being a family man (a friend re-tweeted something about this, that's why I know). And it's normal to have bouts of stupidity sometimes; we are, after all, human. But it's really partly his fault that he is receiving this kind of attention, which has now turned into cyber-bullying.

Bill Belsey of cyberbullying.org defined cyber-bullying as, "...the use of information and communication technologies to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behaviour by an individual or group, that is intended to harm others." According to the definition, a lot of Pinoys are doing just that. Some people also have resorted to racism.

I hope we stop this already. It's normal to laugh at such events, but it's already considered cyber-bullying to continue humiliating and posting hate-comments about Mr. Lao online. I implore to the creator of Mr. Lao's fanpage to take it down, as it promotes cyber-bullying; also I request my readers who are guilty of this crime, if you haven't already done so, to take down your hate-comments and re-posts of the video. Thank you.

**Due to the sensitivity of this issue, I edited out the names of the reporter and network involved, in the title, the entry itself, and labels/tags. I also re-published the entry as a new one since the url of the original reflected the network's name, hence the comments were also deleted.