Thursday, April 19, 2007

Carnage and celebrity

Evan, I had to break from hunting down story ideas to echo what you said about coverage of the Va. Tech shooter. I heard Howard Kurtz, the estimable Washington Post media critic, on the radio yesterday. Asked whether the (fully understandable) press frenzy this week played into the hands of people who want to go out in a blaze of "glory," he was irritably dismissive, responding with something like: "That sounds a lot like blaming the press." Of course, he said, we have to cover this as the major event that it is.

Well, yes. But the choice isn't coverage or non-coverage. Cho wanted to go down as an action hero. So he took hyper-macho photos of himself posing in the manner of a bad-ass assassin in a video game (or, as some accounts suggest, as a character from a Korean action movie).

What if the "respectable" press collectively decided that, no, we aren't going to assist in a murderer's posthumous advertising campaign. We'll print your name, and your mug shot, and that's it.

Or, in an even stronger signal to would-be copycats, papers and TV shows could decline to report the killer's name at all. The info would leak out somewhere, of course, but there'd be a tinge of shame attached with purveying or viewing it.

On second thought, my second idea would hamper any investigations that continue. Nevertheless, given our fame-at-all costs culture, we could do worse than think hard about ways to cut the direct connection between mass murder and instant media celebrity.

Not putting the killer's self-memorializing photos on the front page might be a start; an unmarked grave might be another step.

Posted by Christopher Shea at 11:41 AM

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