The thinking inside the box

By Stephen Nellis

I take a sort of pride in not owning a television. Last week reminded me why.

Between murders at Virginia Tech on April 16, Cho Seung-Hui paused to mail off a package to NBC. It contained a multimedia manifesto.

But that’s puffing Cho’s video up a bit. It was really just the ramblings of a profoundly disturbed young man, a young man who sought to pin the blame for his rage on anyone or anything other than himself. No point, no value, no insight. Just adolescent sociopathology mixed with semi-automatic weapons and nothing to lose.

The only meaningful thing Cho’s package told us was that he wanted to be heard. And we can infer from his decision to mail his rant to NBC – a major network – that he wanted a large audience. He wanted a media spectacle, wall-to-wall coverage, all-Cho-all-the-time. In short, he wanted a national tragedy with his face on it.

And Mr. Cho got what he wanted. First NBC, and then other networks, aired the “Cho Show” on continuous loop beginning around 6 p.m. Wednesday of last week. The next morning, newspapers across the country ran still images taken from the video, mostly of Cho posing with his pistols pointed either at the camera or himself. Did you notice the nifty NBC logo in the corner of so many of those still images in the newspapers? Call it branding, I suppose.

Thank goodness for NBC. Now, each and every one of us who saw the images knows what it looked like to stare down the barrel of Cho’s pistol. And the families of those who died could see exactly what their loved ones might have seen before they were shot and killed. Boy, I bet those folks were thrilled.

I’m nonplussed at why NBC decided to air the footage or why newspapers decided to run images taken from it. Was it not incredibly obvious that having his rant slathered across airwaves and headlines was precisely what Cho wanted? Was it not equally obvious that the footage provided no useful insight into what happened and only served to further the grief and suffering of those who had already lost loved ones? And did we really need the American Psychiatric Association to tells us that airing the footage over and over might spur copycats?

The arguments I heard in favor of airing the footage were weak. And the people from whom I sought those arguments had plenty of experience and expertise: In the course of writing a Missourian story examining how some newspapers came to the decision to run images from Cho’s video, I interviewed Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute and our own Charles Davis.

Both argued that journalists are in the business of telling people what they know, not holding information back. Davis went further and asserted that seeing the footage could help viewers process a seemingly senseless tragedy, could help confirm people’s secret hope that this really was a random madman and that there really was nothing we could have done to prevent him. Both McBride and Davis agreed that NBC showed concern for the families of victims by carefully editing Cho’s blathering before airing it.

But neither Davis nor McBride put the question of whether to air the footage to what I would deem a careful analysis. I point this out not to say that their conclusions are flawed or their reasoning specious, but rather to say that I operate on different core beliefs about journalism.

Airing the video was sure to cause harm and suffering to the victims’ families and loved ones. But journalists are often called upon to cause harm and suffering when a greater public good is at stake, so this fact alone will not answer the question of whether the footage should air.

There are two other questions to be asked here: Who are the people who might be harmed by airing the footage? Would the good done by airing the footage outweigh the harm done by doing so?

The people likely to be harmed by airing the footage were those whose loved ones were killed. They were private individuals in a moment of profound vulnerability. They sought neither power nor fame and their private grief was now at the mercy of television cameras and microphones.

The distinction between power seekers and private individuals is important for journalists. Journalists are justified in examining those who have sought power, privilege and press time, but that justification does not necessarily extend universally. It’s one thing to expose the inveterately dishonest war-mongerers in the White House and another thing to mine the suffering of families involuntarily thrust into the spotlight by a deranged killer.

And what good could airing the video do? None whatsoever. It provides no insight into why Cho did what he did other than that he was a sociopath. (Was that in much question?) It provides no meaningful way forward. The only potential gain to be had was to reassure the public that Cho was simply a madman and that there was truly nothing we could have done to predict or prevent his killing spree.

However, it was unnecessary to air the video to provide the public with that information. The NBC news team could have simply explained the content of the video and then stated, “Because of the graphic content of Cho’s video and our desire to respect the grieving families of those killed, NBC has chosen not air the video itself.”

Because all the potential good accomplished by could have been achieved without airing it, we were, on balance, left with only the harm done by airing the footage. The families of those killed, still mired grief, anger and disbelief, were treated to looped footage of Cho waving his pistols in their faces. And the rest of us are still scared out of our wits, because we now know for certain we can never prevent another crime like this. No logic can stop a madman who is himself unbound by logic.

But I suppose there is one last potential benefit to running Cho’s rant that I failed to consider: the immense amount of cash media outlets garnered by feeding the public’s lurid curiosity and frothing desire for twisted tragedy.

I find it interesting that Davis and McBride’s ethics and core beliefs happen to systematically produce results also ripe with through-the-roof ratings and profits. It would of course be fallacious to assume any sort of causation when there is only correlation. And I’m sure Davis and McBride are well aware the tensions introduced by journalism’s classically “for-profit” nature.

I’m just as guilty of wanting to eat as the next aspiring reporter. But is this what happens when your paychecks are for too long signed by the Media Hydra, of which our blessed J-School is but a minor slithering head? Does it cloud the mind so?