Too Little Too Late

Christine Everhart

WHiH – Primetime live

"Good Evening. For those who wouldn't know who I am, my name is Christine Everhart. I am a journalist. I was an editorialist for Vanity Fair. I am now a TV anchor here at WHiH. I have been writing on the question of the superheroes since the famous Iron Man press conference. I am also a fervent defender of the accords. I think that the Avengers should be held accountable for the devastation they leave behind them. Even after General Ross demise, and he did deserve that I will admit to that much, I still think that the superheroes should work hand in hand with the governments of all the countries of the world. Saving people should not be at the risk of others. I believe also that the damages caused by the Avengers shouldn't be at the charge of the people who lived there beforehand. But I'm not here, tonight, to talk about that. I want to talk about Tony Stark.

"Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on current and past events." That's the definition you can find on Wikipedia. If you scroll down the article, just a little, you will also learn about the ethics of the profession. Truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and public accountability. I will admit now that we, the so-called journalists, have not been ethical. I have not be ethical. And that for quite a while. The road I took was the easy one. The one that would give me the scoop, the front page, the spotlight. In this new world of 24-hours news, the competition among media organisations has become crazy. Each story became sensationalised. Everybody was singing the same tune. It was easy to be a voice in that choir. We just needed to sing louder than the next reporter. Problem is that everybody was wrong.

For the last few weeks, someone (one or many persons) have been uploading different content all over the internet. Videos, classified reports, audio files. Those documents point a whole different story that was not so hard to find. A good journalist should have dig a little further. Just looking a tiny bit closer in the Shield data dump would have opened our eyes on the truth about the Avengers and about Tony Stark. Even without that, we should have put into questions event like that, or the very existence of a shadow agency like Shield. None of us did.

We have all read the assessment that Natasha Romanov made on Iron man, but now we know everything about the palladium poisoning. The black widow didn't have any training in psychology or anything of the sort. Nor did she studied nursing to be able to inject someone in the neck no less. We have all seen Thor holding a baseline human by the throat with the team standing there doing nothing. We watched as Wanda Maximoff sent off the Hulk on Johannesburg. Iron Man was the only one standing able to try and calm Dr Banner down. We were now witness of Tony Stark's breaking down after having to watch his parents being murdered while the killer was standing not but two meters away from him.

When Stark came back from Russia alone, we never asked the right questions. He was quite obviously injured but did we care? No. Because we were following the same old patterns when it came to our good old Tony. Somehow, somewhere, he "fucked" up and now he was trying to contain the aftermath. The PR team from SI is a real good one. The mistakes were not always Tony's though. He didn't call the Chitauri to attack New York. He didn't dumped the data of Shield on the internet. Even the creation of Ultron was not on his shoulders alone. Now that we look back, he was the only one to admit his mistakes and do something about it. Iron Man was the first super-hero to own up to his name, not hiding being a fake identity. We could argue about Captain America doing the same. As a propaganda guy, everybody knew his name. Did he want to go on the bond tour? No. After that, he spent a long time under the ice while all the children in America were reading the exploit of Steve Rogers. Once again, not his choice. His identity being known was a side effect of a decision he didn't really want to make.

From that day when Tony Stark announced that he was Iron Man, we, the so-called journalist fell into the easiness. When the man was owning his mistakes and thriving to do better, it became easy for us to blame him for it. And then other heroes came along but they weren't there to share the blame. New York was attacked by aliens. Back then, we didn't know about Shield meddling with an artefact not of this world called the tesseract. Thor warned them about it and the repercussions. The Chitauri, led by the Asgardian god Loki, destroyed a lot of the city. The avengers came together to protect us. And they did. Messily but they did. It could have been worse in many ways. Especially if that nuclear missile had found its way to the city. We owed our life to them, especially to Tony Stark. Once again, we should have look into that World Council, into that decision to sacrifice a whole city if not more. Days later, while we were walking among the ruins, watching so many lives being cut short or destroyed, we forgot about that. Tony had started paying for the repairs and was left by his brand-new team to deal with the aftermath. Once occurrence shouldn't make a pattern. But it did.