Thursday, April 19, 2007

Va. Tech and the celebrity killer

Seeing an image of the Virginia Tech shooter on the front page of papers this morning left me a little ill, and a blog search reveals that I'm not the only one. NBC's receipt of Seung-Hui Cho's package of goodbye materials -- including 23 pages of rambling text and 28 video clips -- presented the network with an obvious dilemma.

This was newsworthy material, but doesn't publishing it to an international audience grant Cho the infamy he so clearly wanted? Video of Daniel Pearl's beheading created a similar moral quandary, but no serious new organization showed its key moments. There we had an issue of graphic violence, but are the questions so different here? We know what decision NBC made, although they broadcast only portions of what they had.

From the blog Voices of Hope, devoted to "all things media and pop-culture with a socio-political point of view":

by broadcasting the words and images of a killer under the auspices of 'understanding' we give the power back to the violator and minimize the stories of the people (victims) most affected by this horrible turn of events. This violent student killer's (I don't even want to memorialize his name) story takes away the power of the victim's stories and sensationalizes the problem, making him appear as a hero-villain.

From Chris Shaw, on the Guardian Web site:

This is exactly the kind of instant notoriety sought by the disturbed spree killers, from Dunblane through to Columbine and now Virginia Tech. Fears of copy-cat killings seeking instant cyber celebrity are not unfounded in my opinion.

It seems possible to me, too, that to the truly desperate, lonely, and suicidal, international notoriety, even in death, might be preferable to the misery they face in silence.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:32 AM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss