Schools
WorldStarHipHop Spotlighted after Long Reach Video
The website publishes a constant stream of controversial videos.
By now, it seems almost everyone in Howard County has seen the controversial video. In the 27-second clip, a man in a ski mask approaches a student at Long Reach High School, both of them raise their fists, and then the student knocks the man out with one punch.
As of noon on Monday, the video has garnered over 970,000 hits on the controversial website WorldStarHipHop.com. The site publishes about 30 videos per day. Most feature hip hop artists, buxom women, personal stories or fights. The fight videos appear to be by far the most popular videos on the site, based on viewership statistics.
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The site is the 301st most popular website in the United States, according to an article in Explore Howard, making it more popular than NBC.com, Gawker and MTV.
A professor quoted in the article said the site gathers videos “that are shocking on multiple levels and feed into peoples’ voyeuristic tendencies.”
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New York Magazine wrote an article about the site in February, interviewing the founder, Q O'Denat, about whether it perpetuates stereotypes.
“This is a serious question, Q allowed, something he thinks about a lot,” wrote the author, Mark Jacobsen.
Banner ads go for $2,500 a piece, according to the New York article.
In Columbia, the WorldStar video has stirred controversy. Every local news outlet has swarmed to the story and worried that irreparable damage may have been done to Long Reach’s reputation.
Others maintained that Long Reach has had no more instances of violence than any other school in Howard County. In fact, Long Reach is just above the stastical average of students suspended for instances of attacks/fights/threats in Howard County from 2008-2011, according to Maryland Public Schools data. Over that three-year span, Long Reach had 106 suspensions compared with a Howard County high school average of 104 during the same time. Reservoir High had the most with 175 and Hammond had 162.
“Stop making it sound like Long Reach is the only school in the region that has things like this happen,” wrote Skyler Waye. “Nobody can control a man in a ski mask that comes out of nowhere to make a fool himself.”
