So I guess you're saying the stuff shouldn't have been aired, even though you seem to admit that there's some arguable public interest in airing it?

I guess it's always tricky when the killer wants his rants to be aired. But unlike bin Laden or Zarqawi or the Pearl killers, Cho is dead now. Perhaps he imagined some satisfaction in the after-life but he was sorely mistaken. He's dead now and has no idea whether his rants were aired or not.

The rest of us are alive and curious as to why he'd do what he did. He sent his own self-selected and slanted evidence to NBC. They showed us some of it. I don't see anything really wrong with that.

One could maybe argue that a living terrorist, at large, gets some mileage out of news coverage, though I don't think they get enough mileage that their rantings shouldn't be aired just so that we get a glimpse into what we're dealing with. But Cho gets nothing. He's dead and out of the game of life. The dead don't get to answer the softball questions on Larry King.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

I don't have a strong feeling.  It's arguably either newsworthy, pointless, or dangerously encouraging others to seek publicity, but it'd have ended up all over the Web anyhow and thus eventually backed into the mainstream media on that account as well.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

It's a narrow benefit, but seeing him on the video helped fill in some kind of hole in my understanding of the event. I didn't need to see much, but it did inform me in a way that none of the coverage until then had done. 

I would not want news organizations to err on the side of keeping information from me, as though the audience was too fragile to handle it. What I found objectionable in NBC's actions, though, was the incessant flogging of the 'scoop' all that afternoon, evening and into the next day, until the reaction against this excess of self-congratulation set in.

It wasn't the content, it was the amount of time they spent playing it, over and over and over and over and over....

The 24/7 cable news cycle is a beast that they feel must be filled with the cheapest content possible, apparently.

Personally, I feel that having heard and seen some of the materials from the manifesto, I know a tremendous amount about Cho that I didn't know previously. And I would like to know even nore.

I don't accept the notion that we should all just be satisfied with applying a one-size-fits-all category of "depraved loner" to Cho, and leave it at that. Nor do I think it is adequate to "know him by his works." Of course, he was depraved and was a loner, as were most of the others who engaged in this kind of killing. And it is true that his external actions tell us a great deal about what motivated him to do what he did. But that is not enough. The unabomber differed from the two Columbine killers in important ways; and those killers in turn differed from Cho. All four showed deep alienation and resentment. But each also exhibited his own peculiar mental traits, and the appropriate responses to each action thus vary as well.

What strikes me as a bit unique about Cho is that the walled pit of silence in which he had buried himself, seemingly from a very early age, was much more profound and impentrable than in the case of any of the other famous murderers I can remember. I am struck by the various ways in which those around him responded to this eerie silence. And I want to see and attempt to understand what was on the other side of that wall: the system of cogitation, fantasy and emotion that was taking shape behind the wall, and that ultimately provoked his outburst. So I am very glad NBC broadcast pieces of the manifesto, and wish they had broadcast more, because these broadcasts were responsive to my own desire to understand, a desire which I expect was experienced by very many others.

For as long as I can remember, nothing has more starkly revealed the difference between the conservative and liberal temper than the response to human crime and violence. Conservatives often say the explanation for criminal violence is just some mystical combination of "evil" and "free will". Because they believe human actions transcend nature and are semi-miraculous, and fall outside the nexus of causation in the natural world, they tend to regard human society fatalistically, and despair of our capacity for social progress. They frequently react with great hostility to attempts to examine and understand the motives of deviant personalities, because these attempts tend to tear through the fatalistic cloaks of mystery they want to throw over human society, and the social stasis and traditions they crave.

The liberal temperament tends toward the assumption that human behavior has causes; that those causes are highly complex, but are intelligible in principle; and that by working to hard to debate, study and understand those causes we can ultimately make changes in our way of life, and improve it.

By the way, while it is true the networks didn't show the actual beheading of Daniel Pearl, they did, as I recall, broadcast the killer's declamation that preceded it on the video - as well they should have.

I don't know what the endless wallowing in this pain does for public, it certainly doesn't seem to bring about any kind of meaningful change. Since Charles Whitman climbed that school tower to this tragedy, this kind of cruelty and the attendant publicity seems to be enacted with dismal regularity.

The damage done by showing these endless clips is that we have isolated this man from humanity. He becomes a "monster", someone without connection to ourselves or even like ourselves. Once again we've escaped responsibility as human beings by separating this man from us as a fellow human being as damaged and broken as we can get. We don't have to acknowledge that all human beings are capable of breaking down, of inflicting cruelty and sorrow and pain upon each other.

By playing up the bizarreness of his character and his actions, we fail to see the very ordinariness of it. Why do we accept this kind of killing from one man and not another? Why does society accept and implicitly condone this kind of behavior from Bush but not from Cho? Is it because one uses the state as a surrogate killer and the other did his up close and personal? Is it because one of them is better able to hide his pathology and even have others enable it?

So we have two men, one considered so broken and mentally ill that he has been thrown out of the human race and the other elected to the highest office in the land. We have one who tortured and killed 32 innocent human beings and will always be remembered (if at all) as a psychopathic killer and another who has tortured and killed countless innocent human beings and will be remembered as the 43rd President of the United States.

My question isn't why they endlessly and morbidly play and replay this sick human being's manifesto, it's why they can't make the connection to the other and endlessly play and replay his killing spree.

Yes, he was apparently very, very lonely. However, it does seem to me that various people made tentative gestures from time to time to develop a connection with him, and that they were almost always rebuffed. From some combination of hatred and fear, or narcissistic infatuation with the contents of his own mind, Cho craved isolation. How he got this way is an interesting question.

The young man is a paranoid schizophrenic. You can't get inside that kind of mind. The video is pointless.

The NBC News officials who decided to broadcast Cho's hate manifesto profess a plain professional motive - to make him comprehensible, and thereby to enlighten their audience.

Did anyone need 'enlightenment' or a 'reason' or 'glimpse into what we are dealing with' after such a heinous act? The MSM used the incident for the usual reasons, none of which involve 'enlightening' or improving anything but their financial bottom line.

I also don't see why a Cho's (or a Kaczynski's) media manifesto needs to be screened. Maybe better just to starve it of attention by having it described in the most general terms as part of the analysis of the story. Agreed 100% that if these manifestos become the story you build in a payoff, even if only a posthumous one.

There's always Wikipedia or Youtube for the curious.

There are polar differences between terrorists with a political agenda and delusional killers. The actions of terrorists are never justified but their agenda, sometimes genuine, sometimes not, should be disseminated and understood. Is the media conspiring with terrorists if they air their propaganda? Perhaps. But it also might be encouraging terrorism by not examining their grievances.

In any case, posturing videos need not be shown to report a subject. Cho and the Unabomber were obviously insane and delusional. They were attacking the unreality that only existed in their minds. While it might be interesting to some to explore their delusions, it’s not necessary to air their delusions on the nightly news.

The text of Cho’s “manifesto” could have been printed if anyone was really interested. How many who watched his video with keen interest read the Unabomber manifesto when it was printed? Cho sent pictures and video of him in provocative poses. I suspect that he knew it would be irresistible to NBC News. If he could have broadcast the actual massacre, he would have and the media may have shown some of it. Does anyone remember the video of Columbine? I’m sure that many students still remember it.

It is the shocking or bloody pictures that the media can’t resist ("if it bleeds, it leads"). And like a car wreck, we can’t turn away from it. But this is where the media is supposed to exercise editorial discretion in the public interest. The media pays endless lip service to the victims and family of the dead, but do they consider the pain inflicted by shoving this guy in their faces?

I agree. But, if the bottom line is served by disseminating information, rather than keeping it quiet, then that's not a bad thing.

Getting information out there is what they're paid to do.

I'm more worried about what they don't report.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

I do think in this case there is a fine line between a video that might have some instructive info and one with purely prurient appeal. It is not the same as the beheading of Perle that had no informative value (and wasn’t shown on TV because it could not be argued to have any value). But I think the timing and repeated showing reveals a sensational intention. Parents had just learned that their kids had been killed in cold blood and here was the deranged killer pointing his guns and spouting his delusional hate. This is hardly enlightening.

A few years ago, my local station was doing a story on a bar fight between an alcoholic mother and her grown daughter in some small town in another state. I couldn’t understand why they were doing this trivial story until the interview of one of the women popped up. She wasn’t seriously injured but had Frankenstein scars up, down and across her face from the fight. That story only aired because of the gruesome cuts on the woman‘s face.

Personally, I am not necessarily repulsed by violent images. But kids see this stuff, too, and I question the purpose of news media when shock and titillation is its bread and butter.The video would find an outlet somewhere regardless of whether networks show it and that‘s fine for those who have a legitimate interest in it. But like the Faces of Death videos (vol. 1-5) of bloody accidents, suicides and murders that have circulated since vcr's became popular, viewers can choose to see it or not and it doesn't dominate legitimate news.

excellent (the second excellent).

From a news perspective, you can't get inside it. I'm not as convinced that some useful content can't be derived, especially if data from multiple individuals, by mental health professionals.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

I haven't made it that far, yet, I must admit. I think seeing him on video answered one question I'd had, which was "who could do such a thing?"

The video let me say, "Ah, that's what someone who could do such a thing sounds like." A paranoid schizophrenic, perhaps. I don't know what label fits. Someone who's wiring was fried, for sure. It was just better to have a face to put with the crime.

The fact that the warped communication is available is news.  The contents, are not necessarily the news.

The media is a business, not a public service.  They are doing this because it improves their bottom line.

If the objective was to make the information available to those who doubted it had happened this way, they could have posted it to a web page and made the files available to researchers. 

Todd's rant stems from his '60s Shelleyan romanticism -- "[Newsmen] are the unacknowleged legislators of the world" -- or they should be.

The world has moved on; nothing to see, here, folks.

This may be a different area than you had in mind, but I can think of videos and still photographs that apparently were considered too shocking for media release, yet were entirely appropriate in training material for trauma surgeons and emergency responders. Back when I was a chemistry lab instructor, I remember one photograph that made my stomach flip-flop even in black and white.

The photograph was of an alkali burn of the eye, a situation that I could encounter in a laboratory accident, and for which I would have to start the emergency treatment. Much more recent emergency response training gets far more graphic, with the deliberate purpose of desensitizing people who cannot afford to freeze in horror. My sense is the media will draw the line at some of these details.

I'm not convinced the general public can or should be exposed to things that medical people need to see, if for no other reason than patient privacy.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

In today's Washington Post, Broder talks about the University of Memphis being like Virginia Tech in that both have large commuter student populations. What is he talking about? I thought (and I have visited Virginia Tech) it was a school in a fairly rural setting in the Shenandoahs...does it have a large commuting student population? commuting from where?