Friday, April 20, 2007
NBC walks fine line
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Shanna Flowers is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
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In the biggest story, NBC News became the story.
Outraged viewers blasted the network for releasing the now-familiar photo and video images of Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui.
His guns. His hammer. His rambling and profane tirade.
His smiling, frowning and posturing.
NBC executives made a tough call.
It was the right decision. The glimpses into the killer's tormented mind helped millions of viewers -- whether they want to admit it or not -- gain some understanding why these senseless murders occurred.
NBC's release of Cho's "multimedia manifesto," as anchorman Brian Williams called it, created a story-behind-the-story subtext to a tragedy that began Monday morning and gained international coverage.
The decision to air the images prompted a range of viewer anger. Critics complained the network glorified the killer, showed insensitivity to the victims and their families, and potentially fueled future violent incidents, all for the sake of hyping viewership.
In another life, I was a newspaper manager, and I know these types of journalistic decisions are never cut-and-dried.
Airing the images raised an ethical dilemma for NBC. Cho mailed the information to network headquarters Monday morning before he ended the campus rampage with his suicide.
NBC had revelatory information about the killer that would make the network part of the story.
Aly Colon, who teaches journalistic ethics at the Poynter Institute in Florida, wouldn't comment specifically on this decision because he wasn't in the meeting when it was made.
But in general, "The fact that a news organization can help people understand a situation more fully than they have before is always an important issue for the news organization to consider," he said Thursday.
"They were right to use it," said Joe Staniunas, a broadcast journalism instructor at Radford University. "It's a very tough call. They realized the pain and trauma that broadcasting these graphic images were going to create. They balanced that against the tremendous interest people have in trying to find out why this young man did what he did."
Staniunas said he discussed the issued with his journalism class Thursday morning, and the majority of students agreed with NBC.
The Roanoke Times published five of NBC's Cho images on pages 2 and 3 -- breaking with newspapers around the globe that ran the images on the front page.
A team of editors led by Managing Editor Carole Tarrant made the decision to run a memorial picture on the front page and to put the Cho pictures inside.
Tarrant said emotions in this community were still too raw to put a picture of a gun-toting Cho on the front. She's right, too. Geography and proximity are other important ingredients in a decision like this one.
Still, she understood the photos' importance.
"Those pictures are so telling," Tarrant said, adding that the images gave readers a glimpse of the killer's mind-set, even down to his commando-style clothes.
"These pictures help tell the story. I try to assure people we're trying to give you insight into the decision, of the mental state of this person."
By midafternoon Thursday, Tarrant said she had not received any complaints about the newspaper publishing the pictures.
Readers repeatedly called and e-mailed to thank the newspaper for its coverage -- and to complain about television coverage.
I admit I was riveted the first time I saw images of Cho on NBC.
But when I got home late Wednesday, other networks had picked up NBC's tape.
CNN's ad nauseum replaying of the video and photo images got real old, real quick.
As the night went on, riveting morphed into tiresome, and later on morphed again into overkill.
I suspect that's what many viewers were upset about.
Reacting to the backlash, WSLS (Channel 10) announced Thursday afternoon that it would no longer play the images of Cho.
Good call, for journalism and for the community.
