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I don't know why ppl get mad at that. He was clearly a complete lunatic. if you get mad at that video, you are doing exaclty what that lunatic wanted.
I don't WANT to "understand" Cho. The only people that might want to understand Chow would be the copycat sickos that want to be famous too.
NBC.
I don't know why ppl get mad at that. He was clearly a complete lunatic. if you get mad at that video, you are doing exaclty what that lunatic wanted.
solution: turn off tv.
CBS had an FBI profiler on this morning. When asked if he thought NBC did the right thing by airing the video, he said "in a perfect world, no." He stated how the video was aimed at hurting the victims again. But if NBC had not aired it, either a leak or lawsuits would have eventually allowed the video to be aired. In his opinion, by airing it quickly, NBC is going to allow the victims to get passed it quicker.
I found there to be some irony in the media asking, after the release of the manifesto, about the wisdom of broadcasting it. I find that ironic because, had NBC chosen to sit on it and not broadcast it, those questioning the wisdom of the broadcast would likely be screaming about having been denied access to the images.
The killer has undoubtedly accomplished the goal that he intended. And I'll join the fear that copycats are nearly inevitable.
Fox kept showing the pictures and video non stop.
That is why they are called "media".
Their goal is ratings. Ratings=money.
That is the way capitalism works.
Reaction:
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...041802791.html
Network Says It Debated for Hours Whether to Air Shooter's Images
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 19, 2007; A09
The unexpected package from Cho Seung Hui that arrived at NBC News yesterday morning contained both a worldwide scoop and a journalistic dilemma.
After turning over the original do ents to federal authorities, NBC News President Steve Capus said last night, he faced a "tough call" in deciding how much to air, if any, of the Virginia Tech gunman's expletive-filled video and 1,800-word letter, along with photos of Cho and his guns and bullets.
"We tried to be sensitive to the families involved and to the investigation," Capus said in an interview. While it is "possible" that some relatives of the 32 students shot to death Monday may say that the network is giving the killer the platform he wanted, "they also may say, 'We want to know why. We need to know what was in his head, what drove him to do this.' This is a portrait of a killer."
Capus said Virginia State Police officials, in a conversation about noon, asked NBC to "hold off" on releasing the material until they had a chance to review the material. The state authorities gave NBC the green light about 4:30, saying it would not jeopardize the probe. The network aired portions of the video and note on "NBC Nightly News" at 6:30.
Anchor Brian Williams told viewers: "We are sensitive to how all of this will be seen by those affected, and we know we are, in effect, airing the words of a murderer here tonight. . . . So much of it is so profane, so downright gross and incomprehensible. We tried to edit carefully for broadcast tonight." The segment was posted on http://msnbc.com.
Former FBI agent Clint Van Zandt told Williams that the mailing was Cho's "ultimate victory. This is the way he's victimizing, further victimizing all of us, by reaching out from the grave and grabbing us and getting our attention and making us listen to his last rambling words and pictures."
Of course, no one forced NBC to broadcast those words and pictures. Capus said network journalists debated for hours what they should make public. "There are some things we haven't shown and words we haven't released that are more appropriate to hold back," he said. "Journalists have a responsibility. We're not just here to pass on in direct form raw video and complete do ents."
The Washington Post and New York Times drew both praise and criticism in 1995 after publishing, at the request of federal authorities, a 35,000-word manifesto by the serial killer known as the Unabomber. In this case, with Cho dead by his own hand, critics were questioning last night whether NBC's decision to show the pictures and video might embolden other would-be murderers to seek such notoriety.
Nate Calhoun, a Blacksburg High School senior who lost a close friend in the massacre, came to the campus last night to pay respects to the victims. He blasted the network. "NBC really ticked my last nerves," he said. "The way this university is already struggling with pain, I object to them putting these pictures out like that. It's just not fair."
Kerry Redican, president of the Virginia Tech Faculty Senate, said he was not surprised by what he saw in the video. "This is a cold, calculating sociopath," he said. "He must have had a narcissistic core to him."
Redican said he approved of the NBC decision to air the material: "People are trying to make some sense of this. This showed the whole thing was really planned out."
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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...ck=1&cset=true
Gunman handed NBC an exclusive and a quandary
Critics say the network is glorifying the Virginia Tech shooter.
By Matea Gold
Times Staff Writer
April 19, 2007
NEW YORK — The oversized U.S. Postal Service envelope was addressed simply to "NBC," and might have been overlooked in the jumble of mail flooding into the television network's Rockefeller Center headquarters Wednesday if a sharp-eyed mail carrier hadn't noticed the return address: "Blacksburg, Va." The sender: "Ishmael."
Those clues were enough to alarm the Postal Service employee, who flagged the mailroom when he dropped it off about 11 a.m. NBC security officials were immediately called to examine the package.
Inside, they found a lengthy do ent featuring more than 40 photos of Seung-hui Cho with handguns and other weapons, accompanied by a rambling, 1,800-word, profanity-laced diatribe. A separate DVD contained two dozen Quicktime videos of the Virginia Tech senior raging about the wealthy and insisting that he was pushed to violence.
"You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option," Cho said in one of the videos in which he compared himself to Jesus and the two teenage killers at Columbine High School.
The "multimedia manifesto," as it was dubbed by network anchor Brian Williams, offered the first extensive window on the gunman responsible for the worst school shooting in U.S. history — and handed NBC a major exclusive on a story that has dominated the news all week.
The unforeseen bonanza of information forced the network to juggle its urge to be first with the legal and ethical implications of broadcasting the materials. Could airing the materials compromise the investigation or glorify Cho's actions?
"This is very difficult," said Steve Capus, president of the news division. "We're all looking for unique angles. You just hope all of your training as journalists and as good citizens comes to bear."
Capus said the network immediately notified law enforcement officials about the package and delayed reporting about it until investigators announced its existence.
Only then, after extensive internal deliberations with Williams, standards officials and other news executives, did he decide to air excerpts of Cho's rantings, first broadcast on "NBC Nightly News" on Wednesday evening.
"Everybody wanted to know, 'Why did he do this, why carry out such a hateful act,' " Capus said. "I think this is as close as we will ever come to understanding, and for that reason we needed to release some of this."
But NBC's decision triggered an angry backlash from viewers. Within a few hours, MSNBC.com message boards filled with postings denouncing the decision, many angrily accusing the network of exploiting the materials and potentially inspiring copycats. Some vowed never to watch again.
NBC spokeswoman Allison Gollust said the network "gave careful consideration to what we would air, and have only shown a small fraction of what we received."
She added that news executives decided Wednesday night to limit the use of the video to no more than 10% of airtime, or no more than six minutes per hour on MSNBC.
Capus learned of the package about noon, when an NBC security official pulled him out of an editorial meeting and told him, "I've got something you need to see."
The security department handed him a copy of the materials (they said they had duplicated the do ents and DVD to keep from compromising the originals), and when Capus began examining them, "It just took my breath away. I couldn't quite believe it."
The package had been postmarked at 9:01 a.m. EDT Monday, shortly before Cho gunned down 30 people in Norris Hall. It was sent through overnight mail, but because it had the wrong ZIP Code it did not arrive until Wednesday morning.
Capus immediately called Pete Williams, NBC's Justice Department correspondent, who was in Washington covering the Supreme Court's decision to uphold a ban limiting abortions. They quickly decided he should hand that story off to another reporter and come to New York. Williams reached out to his contacts at the FBI, who in turn alerted the Virginia State Police.
Local FBI agents arrived at Rockefeller Center soon afterward to pick up the original do ents, while Capus spent most of the afternoon in discussions with Virginia police officials, who initially asked him to delay reporting on the package until they had a chance to examine the materials.
"I thought that was a reasonable request," the news president said.
Shortly after 4 p.m. EDT, Col. Steven Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, broke the news about the package at a news conference in Virginia, praising NBC for handling the situation "with dignity."
About the same time, MSNBC, NBC's cable channel, began touting the existence of materials, with anchors repeatedly noting their network's role in the story.
They reminded viewers that NBC would broadcast excerpts on the evening news and, minutes before, MSNBC.com showed the first image of the gun-toting student.
Still, some raised questions.
"Is this ethical?" MSNBC's Tucker Carlson asked former FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt.
The MSNBC analyst said that although he was contributing to the network's reporting on the materials, he nevertheless felt uncomfortable with the decision to put Cho's diatribes on air.
"This is what this guy wants," Van Zandt said. "He wants to be able to reach his hand out of the grave and grab us by the throat and make us listen to him one more time."
On "NBC Nightly News," Williams assured viewers, "We are sensitive to how all of this will be seen by those affected."
He later added, "We're working with law enforcement on some of this because we don't want to create any more heroes or martyrs from this."
Before signing off, Williams noted that NBC would air more of the materials Thursday morning on "Today."
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NGADPBFF41.DTL
VIRGINIA TECH MASSACRE
FUTURE: Has NBC ushered in a new era for multimedia?
Tim Goodman, Chronicle Television Critic
Thursday, April 19, 2007
The deadly shooting rampage at Virginia Tech took a strange twist Wednesday afternoon when law enforcement officials said "a critical component of this investigation" had surfaced -- a package sent by Cho Seung-Hui to NBC News containing videos, still photos and a rambling multipage letter. NBC News turned the contents over to the FBI but aired portions of videos and the letters on "NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams" Wednesday night.
So now NBC and MSBNC and MSNBC.com find themselves in the middle of one of the hottest stories of the year. And that fact certainly raises a lot of ethical questions. As Tucker Carlson said on MSNBC Wednesday: "It's a little bit like pornography. Should we air it?" Of course, the decision to air it was already made by then, because NBC had been hyping it throughout the afternoon. No doubt NBC and MSNBC will get quite a e in the ratings.
It is odd that NBC initially decided to sit on what is essentially a breaking news story until Brian Williams and the "Nightly News" could unveil it (at least for the West Coast audience). After the segment aired on the East Coast, it was released by NBC and began showing up on the other cable news channels, but with the boldfaced NBC News stamp on it, of course. And while Bay Area TV viewers had to wait until the 5:30 p.m. "Nightly News" broadcast to see the segment, it was immediately available on the MSNBC Web site an hour and a half earlier.
So, is this news? Is NBC -- and the rest of the TV news outlets -- giving Cho exactly what he wanted? Obviously, newspapers will use this material as well, but there was something disturbing about the saturation effect of watching photo after photo play in a slide show on MSNBC Wednesday night.
A hammer, a knife, a Glock, a picture of Cho holding a gun to his own head -- photo after photo kept coming. I wonder how long before people snapped off the TV -- or were they sitting there immobilized, transfixed by the repeating images? Pretty much every media outlet showed the video as soon as NBC released it, but not with the same kind of in-your-face-ness that MSNBC seems to relish. Is this the ultimate "get" or just the kind of ethical burden MSNBC has now fumbled? A lot of questions at hand.
News outlets called Cho's rambling letter "his manifesto." Williams more accurately called it "a multimedia manifesto." No doubt it will usher in a new era of how psychopaths use technology to get their messages to the media. On "Hardball," after the initial "Nightly News" broadcast, Williams talked about the "1,800-word diatribe" and the 29 photos that were sent to NBC.
To his credit, Williams -- who showed more restraint in one minute than Chris Matthews in two separate "Hardball" shows Wednesday -- said, "We are carefully editing what we say."
He sounded appropriately conflicted about being the one, along with his network, who has these images. "This is the going evidence we have to examine," he said by way of an explanation for why NBC aired the video clips and still photos of Cho.
Williams said that NBC was careful in the editing and that more -- previously unseen -- footage would air Thursday morning on "Today." If that didn't fill you with synergistic dread, then perhaps you're not as jaded as the rest of us.
He was certainly right on one point.
"This was a sick business tonight," Williams said, with a shake of his head. But Matthews quickly added that it will go down as a famous day in NBC's history.
"There are definitely things that shouldn't see the light of day," NBC News President Steve Capus told Keith Olbermann on "Countdown" Wednesday night, as he explained that the network will continue to suppress some of the footage.
But by admitting that -- after having aired some of the footage already -- NBC is putting itself in a tough spot. There will be certain factions who believe all of the tape should be seen and that NBC's role as arbiter of the content is wrong (though that's what news outlets do daily: editing). Who knows what the fallout will be? What is certain is that Wednesday's developments were certainly unexpected -- and uncomfortable.
I thought Cho looked stupid. He was a complete loser. The video is helpful in identifying other losers.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/about/burman/...nd_issues.html
A story of victims and issues, not only the killer
Wednesday, April 18, 2007 | 01:26 PM ET
So what will be the iconic image that will forever recall the massacre at Virginia Tech?
Will it be the grandfatherly face of Holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu? Or the glowing smile of Canadian Jocelyne Couture-Nowak? Or some sort of composite photo of the more than 30 innocent victims of this awful event?
Or will it be the sullen image of the dark, demented killer?
Since it is still only hours after the Virginia shootings, it is too early to answer this question but not too early to know how this question will be answered.
It will be answered largely by the news media in the days and weeks after the event, and it will reflect the emphasis that news organizations choose to give to their coverage.
These decisions — about how the coverage is framed, what angles are emphasized and whose individual stories are highlighted — will undoubtedly come after intense discussions in every newsroom. After all, journalists know that their audiences care passionately about these issues.
We certainly know that at the CBC. It wasn’t too long ago, only last autumn, when Canadians experienced their own school shooting at Montreal’s Dawson College. One young gunman went on a rampage, killing one student and wounding 19 others before killing himself. This was followed a few weeks later in rural Pennsylvania when five Amish girls were shot dead in their one-room schoolhouse.
These tragic events set off a national debate about how the news media cover these shootings, and this debate had a genuine impact this week on the CBC’s coverage of the Virginia shootings.
The discussion last autumn about Dawson and Pennsylvania focused on how much responsibility the media should bear for what turned out to be six attacks at schools and colleges in North America in a six-week period.
Several specialists in the field in both Canada and the U.S. argued that the media’s blanket coverage of these “crimes of notoriety” encouraged copycats by “glorifying” their act. They urged the media to reduce their preoccupation with the killers, their iden y and their photographs — and not report “idle speculation” about their motives.
Overwhelmingly, they urged the focus be on the victims instead.
I dealt with these arguments in two columns last autumn and they provoked one of the biggest outpouring of reaction to any of my previous 50 or so ‘letters.’
On October 5, 2006, I outlined the arguments of those working in the field, and on October 11, I highlighted the hundreds of responses this debate had received. They are both available online, and they are interesting reading in light of the shootings this week at Virginia Tech.
No two incidents are the same, and there are no easy ‘guidelines’ that resolve all issues. But at the CBC this week, we tried to apply some of the lessons we felt we learned last autumn fom our audience and from experts.
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 quan y of the coverage on CBC Newsworld and elsewhere was reduced after the initial hours.
It is a delicate balancing act, and more of an art than a science. Have we got it right? Probably not , but I think it was an improvement over last autumn. I will let you, the audience, be the judge of that.
But at least I think we have tried to address the central issues related to this tragegy, and not just exploited the emotion. And we have tried not to evade the hard questions.
Of all of the various interviews I saw and heard in the past few days since the shootings, the one that troubled me the most was an interview on one of the American television newscasts.
It was with the producer of a popular U.S. radio hotline program. He was asked how the debate over lenient gun laws in Virginia was being reflected on his program.
“We don’t allow this issue to be discussed,” he replied. “We know from past experience that the pro-gun lobby is organized to swarm our phone lines and we wouldn’t be able to broadcast any debate. So we don’t talk about that.”
In this kind of atmosphere, who says these tragic events won’t happen again?
Postscript: On Wednesday afternoon, a few hours after this column was written and posted, NBC News in New York announced it had received in the mail a package from the killer. It contained a compilation of 27 video clips, 43 still photos of him holding guns and a hammer and a largely incoherent 'manifesto' explaining why he had done it. On its evening newscast, NBC ran several minutes of excerpts, and this video has been rebroadcast by a mul ude of other networks. At the CBC, we debated the issue throughout the evening and made the decision that we would not broadcast any video or audio of this bizarre collection. On CBC Television, Radio and CBC.ca, we would report the essence of what the killer was saying, but not do what he so clearly hoped all media would do. To decide otherwise - in our view -would be to risk copycat killings. Speaking personally, I have long admired NBC News and I am sure my admiration of their journalists will endure. But I think their handling of these tapes was a mistake. As I watched them last night, sickened as I'm sure most viewers were, I imagined what kind of impact this broadcast would have on similarly deranged people. In horrific but real ways, this is their 15 seconds of fame. I had this awful and sad feeling that there were parents watching these excerpts on NBC who were unaware they they will lose their children in some future copycat killing triggered by these broadcasts.
i couldnt believe he actually taped these manifestos and mailed it during the process. i believe with or without showing these videos that their would be copycats eventually. these are bad times
and i just skipped those long articles posted above...im tired of reading about this
I would argue you're doing the same by distributing the video to the world.
I don't know what the right thing to do in this case is, but it makes me very very uncomfortable that this murderer bought himself TV time with the lives of 32 people so he could air his beliefs to the world.
Regardless of the videos or images, a message has been sent that should scare everyone. Terrorists, both domestic and foreign, have the ideal target now. Forget about bombings and hijackings...target the kids in schools. It would be so easy to organize groups of armed men around the country (and world for that matter) to just walk into schools (at any level...elementary, middle school, high school, college) and start killing everyone. They could take out hundreds at a time, and scare the living out of parents everywhere.
It would be nearly impossible to protect them, and that is terror.
my whole take on it is no one is lookin at this kid from his view, the dude was talkin about having been spat on, laughed at, prolly beat the up, teased, harassed and who knows what else through out his life, this is everywhere people are always pickin on someone in the work place, in the military, at schools, and in the streets, an yet even after columbine no one ever thinks that these cats are capable of doing the same at their location.....until it happens and then they are shocked like they had no clue he was capable of this ...i think they knew this might one day happened, but more should have seen done earlier to prevent today i agree on that and im not saying that i am one that is picked but i talk a lot of and it really opened my eyes to their view when columbine kicked off, cause i know i was hard on cats and push the envelope to far but never to this extinct
NBC gave the bas exactly what he wanted.
It pisses me off when people refer to assholes like this as lunatics, psychos, or as someone who is crazy.
A psycho, a lunatic, or someone who is crazy has no idea what he's doing. They do things because they think God told them to do it, or the TV instructed them, or so on. Someone who's crazy has a malfunctioning brain, and cannot help it.
This piece of knew exactly what the he was doing, and he was fully conscious of the effects. He wasn't psychotic or crazy: he was acting out of hatred. To say he's a lunatic gives him a rational explanation for comitting this act, when there is none other than pure evil.
true that....but when they knew his state a few years ago and his anger and rage was at that level there should be a way for preventing him from buyin gats....not that this would have solved the problem but it would have made it a little bit more difficult for him to carry this out.....also i agree this cat knew what he was doin.....he knew to send out a package that wold get airtime spittin his message and he knew what he was goin to do for some time......prolly even years because of what he had experienced.....he doesnt just go out callin these cats snobs and brats because he's jealous
he should be called a terrorist.
So what was Hitler? How about Dahmer and Bundy?
Even someone crazy is capable of drawing up a plan and acting it out. If what this guy did is just a normal person snapping and killing people out of hatred, it would happen more often. There was something wrong with this dude. And there isn't any rational explanation for what he did, even if he was as looney as Roseanne Barr.
I was getting ready to start a reply, but I think you summed it up perfectly.
Yeah, I was surprised NBC aired the footage...and guess what I spooned it in like a rat. We live in a multi media society, maybe the footage and letters will demystify the killer and we can pay attention on what loser and malconent he really was. A ed up kid with a gun can cause immesurable pain. He's not insane or psychotic, he's evil.
What would be the point? He's dead. What, so others that fit his profile can be labeled a terrorist?
Terrorist profile:
Quiet asian guy. He didn't talk to anyone and had trouble meeting girls. Only typed on his computer and never made eye contact with anyone. Picked on in middle school and high school. Rented out the movie "Oldboy".
That describes the majority of asian students in college. Why not label gang members who do drive by shootings "terrorists"?
because their aim isnt as accurate as the asian coasts, thus leavin less drastic results
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