COMM 209, 150: Those NBC videos of the Va. Tech slayer

This week's mass murder at Virginia Tech has raised some painful issues of journalism ethics, most recently the broadcasting Wednesday night of portions of a video made by Cho Seung-Hui, just before he shot and killed 30 people at Virginia Tech.

Media critic Jack Shafer of Slate.com, who in my opinion writes well and almost always displays good judgment (two traits not always found together in media critics), focuses not on the video clips but on TV's repeated airing of them:

NBC News needn't apologize to anybody for originally airing the Cho videos and pictures. The Virginia Tech slaughter is an ugly story, but the five W's of journalism—who, what, where, when, and why—demand that journalists ask the question "why?" even if they can't adequately answer it. If you're interested in knowing why Cho did what he did, you want to see the videos and photos and read from the transcripts. If you're not interested, you should feel free to avert your eyes.

The real story here is the odd restraint NBC News showed. Cho mailed NBC News about two dozen QuickTime videos, of which the network has aired only a handful. NBC anchor Brian Williams said last night that the network is also holding back Cho photos, as well as Cho writings it deems incoherent and obscene. It seems to think that it's protecting viewers by rationing Cho material while at the same time it reruns the already released video indiscriminately. (I wonder if Fox News would be so circumspect if it were sitting on a stockpile of fresh Cho. Actually, I don't really wonder.)

I suspect the networks stopped the Cho reruns in an effort to pre-empt criticisms that they are 1) needlessly upsetting people and 2) inspiring potential copycat killers. As a practical matter, I'll bet they were having a hard time getting the families of the murdered to talk to them as long as The Cho Show was running.

I find it hard not to agree with that. I also find it hard not to enjoy -- probably a little too much -- his digs at Fox News. Shafer adds:

Cable news reruns are usually defensible because nobody but invalids—and perhaps TVNewser—watches the stations around the clock. Viewers dip in for five minutes here, 15 or 30 minutes there, and then flit away. Few notice how much recycling goes on.

When a major story like Virginia Tech breaks, viewers linger, wanting to know more. There's nothing wrong with that expectation. But having committed to going wall-to-wall with the Cho murders, the networks are too cowardly to tell viewers that only 30 minutes of essential Cho story exists, and that viewers should feel free to turn their sets off after they watch that much. Instead, the networks added soy extender and sawdust to inflate 30 minutes of solid news into a six- or seven-hour marathon.

Another viewpoint was taken by the chief news editor of CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., who explained why he downplayed the killer to focus more on the people who were killed:

Overwhelmingly, the focus of our CBC coverage on radio, television and online has been on the victims and the many important issues which flow out of this tragedy.

Have we identified the killer? Yes, but not in a central way. In fact, on Tuesday, CBC.ca held back using the photograph of the killer for several hours because it would have displaced pictures of the victims. When it was used, it was in a secondary place. A similar restraint was evident on The National.

All of CBC’s news services avoided use of speculation and any coverage that could be interpreted as ‘glorifying’ the act. And overall, the quantity of the coverage on CBC Newsworld and elsewhere was reduced after the initial hours.