July 28th was the one year anniversary of the original airing of the WFF-Huntsville story that made Antoine Dodson a household name. The story itself became a viral notable. Then the story became a commercial success for Dodson when the Gregory Brothers auto-tuned the interview, creating the Bed Intruder Song. The song propelled both Dodson and the Gregory Brothers (who had been auto-tuning news clips for some time already) into Web 2.0 fame.
In the year since, I've shared both versions of the video on Facebook, talked about the Gregory Brothers remix in PhD level rhetoric and composition courses, shown the video to four sections of English Composition, read articles, papers, and blog posts about what the phenomenon means with regard to old notions of authorship/copyright/creativity and so on.
As interesting as the phenomenon has been as a student of rhetoric, there is one element of the story that has always troubled me--that is, the exploitative element of the story itself.
When the original story first became a meme, I was troubled by what I saw as an act of exploitation by WFF in its piece. I worried that what made the story so compelling, the reason it was being passed around the internet so much, and indeed the reason WFF edited the interviews in the way they did was that Antoine Dodson is so laughable. The troubling thing is that what makes Dodson so laughable is that he seems to fit into so many stereotypes. We instantly peg him as a ghetto-dwelling, Ebonics-speaking homosexual--proof that the inner city really is inhabited by the something-less-than-humans that middle class suburbanites think it is.
Of course, the part of me that was troubled by the fact that a news station would take advantage of these aspects of Dodson's persona was soon silenced by Dodson himself. It was quickly apparent that he was soaking up the attention, and loving it. And as soon as the Gregory Brothers song began selling on iTunes, he began to make money off the story as well. So, if the story was exploitative, it was at least co-exploitative. Dodson gained from it as much as WFF did.
But what gets lost in a discussion of whether or not Dodson was exploited is what is lost in the original story as well. That is: the victim, Kelly Dodson.
When the story first aired, I noticed the discrepancy in the amount of time the 2 minute, 3 second story devoted to Antoine Dodson (three clips for a total of 31 seconds) versus the time given to Kelly Dodson, his sister (two clips for a total of 7 seconds). So, the brother of the victim gets three times the air time as the victim herself. At the time, I took this as evidence that WFF was exploiting Antoine Dodson's compelling ghetto character at the expense of Kelly. I'm ashamed to say that it was not until much later that I considered whether or not this was a disservice to Kelly more than it was to Antoine. We know that Kelly must have had more than 7 seconds worth of stuff to say, because the story itself contains a clip of her talking and pointing, but this is dubbed over with the voice of the reporter. So, what of Kelly's story is edited out to make room for Antoine's ridiculous, self-aggrandizing rant?
I have little doubt that the story was edited the way it was to feature Antoine because Antoine was, frankly,more fun to watch--because he was so laughable. But the fact is, this was supposed to be a story about an attempted rape. A man violated the sanctity of Kelly Dodson's bedroom, in an attempt to violate her body as well. Such a crime is not and should not have ever been a joke.
The fact that it has become one is certainly an interesting academic phenomenon. But it also ought to trouble us. A news station may very well have robbed a woman of her story in order to amuse its viewers with the antics of her brother. And we lapped it up and laughed it up. Should we be okay with this?
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