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Plan to show street party online nixed after 'pressure' from university: student(Canadian Press (delayed) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) KINGSTON, Ont. _ An enterprising Queen's University's commerce student who planned to broadcast live video coverage of an illegal street party on a website pulled the plug because of what he calls ``strong pressure'' from school administrators. Fourth-year student Ian Macdonald began feeding live video from a webcam in a house this week on Aberdeen Street, the site of the annual unsanctioned event associated with Queen's homecoming. The camera was looking down the street from a window and the feed was briefly available around the world on the Internet, until Macdonald met with two administrators from the university's school of business. ``They quickly found out about it and sat us down and applied some strong pressure and urged us really to reconsider what we were doing,'' Macdonald said. He removed the live feed after the meeting. David Saunders, dean of the Queen's School of Business, said to his knowledge there was no pressure and no threats. ``We absolutely urged them to reconsider what they were doing,'' Saunders said. Last year on homecoming weekend, an estimated 6,500 revellers, jammed the Aberdeen Street on the Saturday night. Kingston police spent more than $240,000 on homecoming and made some 76 arrests. Officers handed out more than 600 liquor law citations, while 23 severely intoxicated people ended up in hospital emergency rooms. Saunders didn't attend the meeting with MacDonald but said that it was his decision to have two other administrators meet with the student and ask him to unplug the camera. Macdonald and a fellow student who operate a web-based business wanted to broadcast coverage of the street party to counter what they argue is biased mainstream media coverage. ``We were doing it with the sole intention of demonstrating to people that Queen's homecoming is a lot tamer than all the hype suggests. We just wanted kind of, like, an objective viewpoint from kind of the centre of it all,'' he said. (Kingston Whig-Standard) Copyright ? 2008 The Canadian Press |