EDITORIAL:

As grizzled newspaper veterans, there isn’t much we haven’t seen.

So the news this week that two Newport Harbor High School teens allegedly beat up a younger Ensign Middle School teen probably should have been a yawner, were it not for a thing called YouTube.

The girls, who now face serious criminal charges, reportedly recorded and then posted the fight on a site hosting videos of things that span the spectrum from innocent to incendiary.

There was another twist. The victim, police said, was a disabled girl. And in our quest to report things quickly in this new web-based world, that’s what our first story said.

We discovered later that it was an erroneous description, but it was too late. Other newspapers, radio and television outlets chased after the story. School officials said they used our report to announce the incident to students and parents.

So what did we learn?

We learned that thanks to the Internet, bullying has been taken to a new level of posterity.

We learned that the speed and reach of the Internet is a powerful tool that must be respected and we should be extra vigilant in our fact checking.

The Internet, as has been illustrated in our reader comments, has what our columnist Bryon de Arakal called an “Old West” quality to it. School-yard brawls are a natural for YouTube and a norm on the Internet.

In a letter to parents at Newport Harbor High School, Principal Michael Vossen said it best:

“Many of us can recall experiencing or witnessing hateful remarks from our high school days,” he wrote. “Those remarks were usually spread either by word of mouth or in writing.

“But today, with the instant and public availability offered by websites such as YouTube and MySpace, our kids are turning more and more to the use of these mediums to spread hateful comments and images resulting in a more pronounced negative effect.”

That’s a lesson that we have to learn, and so do our readers. Civil discourse and decorum have been drowned out by the mean spiritedness and invective-filled screaming that is pervasive in the cyber world.

Parents should be wary of letting their kids delve into this Old West world because the consequences can be tragic as we saw this week. It’s not too late to change the path, but it must start with parents and all of us.

Hearing of school-yard beatings being posted on YouTube certainly shocked us grizzled news veterans. Let’s stop them before they become the norm.