World Star Hip Hop - Media Story

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/18/worldstarhiphop-bankable-brand-brutality The president may have come out swinging in the second presidential debate Tuesday, but on the web another pugilist is still dominating the week. Perhaps you are one of the millions who've watched the grainy video of a Cleveland bus driver who coldcocked an unruly passenger, delivering a brutal uppercut to the jaw that sent her tumbling out of the vehicle. Or perhaps you've watched one of the many spoofs, or the slow-motion replays, or the fan edits in which the bus driver's fist of fury is accompanied by Batman-style "Pow!" effects or the theme song from the video game Mortal Kombat.

This grim video is everywhere, from USA Today to national and international news broadcasts. The airheads of the View, exhibiting a degree of inanity exceptional even for them, got in on the act Monday: one observed that the driver may have been set off by fears of contracting the flu (the passenger had spit on him), while another opined that Ben Kingsley's performance in Gandhi had inspired her to follow the path of nonviolence. But the original publisher of this brutal video is none other than World Star Hip-hop, one of the most depressing outlets in an already bleak constellation of gory shock sites, third-rate mixtape feeds and desperate content aggregators. If you're not yet familiar with World Star, you're one of the few. In the past year, its videos of rappers, strippers and, especially, street fights – all screened in a Ram-hogging proprietary format, on a site whose design would have looked dated during the Clinton administration – have won a million or so pageviews a day: about the same as Gawker, or double the traffic to the soon-to-be-exclusively-digital Newsweek. In my opinion, WSHH allows for people to view videos from all over the world and similar to other video sites such as YouTube or Daily Motion however they cater for a different target audience due to the content that is placed on the site. Some videos such as the one with the bus driver punching a pedestrian who happened to be a woman are somewhat morally wrong however there are videos on the internet that also display this and WSHH cannot be solely blamed for this controversy that has been caused as a result of this.