The Blogging Curmudgeon

The Blogging Curmudgeon
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Fear and Loathing on Television

Oh, the national American media.

Can't investigate massive electoral fraud.

Can't investigate the big corporations and their rape of the environment.

But oh, can they air a sensational video made by a mass murderer--thus victimizing the survivors of his massacre and the families of the victims all over again.

No, I won't post the disgraceful video Cho Seung-Hui made and the mailed while in the middle of his killing spree...but I guess my natural reticence to air something so disgusting and gruesome disqualifies me to be a member of the esteemed Fourth Estate.

The hypocrites are out in force, of course--including Curmudgette on MyLeftWing, whose sensitivity to online threats and real world violence against women apparently doesn't extend to the pain of the survivors and families of the victims.

(CNN) -- Angry students, faculty and loved ones urged the media to focus on the 32 victims of Monday's shootings on the Virginia Tech campus, not the twisted words and images of the man who gunned them down.

Peter Read, father of victim Mary Read, pleaded for media outlets to stop broadcasting the images that Cho Seung-Hui mailed on the day of the shooting.

"It's a second assault on us," he said. "It's a second assault on our children. Please put the focus back where it belongs: on these wonderful, vibrant, young human beings who were bringing so much to this world."

"It's made victims out of many of us a second time," Virginia Tech professor Richard Shyrock said on CNN amid a plea for the network to reconsider its decision to air the photographs and rambling, angry videos.

The package was mailed after two people were killed at a dormitory early Monday and before Cho entered the university's Norris Hall and exacted the worst mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history.

NBC broadcast some of the angry images and video clips from the package and other media outlets -- including CNN -- quickly followed suit.

Doctoral student Ken Stanton, 29, said he resented that Cho was getting airtime while many of the victims, such as his friend, Jeremy Herbstritt, remained anonymous.

"I'm sick of it," he said. "It's like you can't get away from it -- every time I walk by a TV, there it is."

Source link

Here's a list of Cho's victims--none of whom get celebrity status.

Here's a video slideshow of the victims--which I find very moving (and yes, I'm aware that the video creator misspelled "tragedy"...I don't give a damn, ok?)


4 comments:

supersoling said...

only objection I have with airing the video from Cho is that it was done too soon. I think that the media saturation coverage of the event itself, the requisite bleeding dry of the victims and their families on network and cable talk shows, and most importantly the utter blackout of news from Iraq, when it's been one of the bloodiest weeks of the war, are far more damning than airing Cho's video and reproducing his "manifesto" were. It's all about ratings. To suddenly cry foul and ask where are their morals is pretty naive I think. The world is littered with our victims and we don't see it on the tv. For Christ's sake, we don't even see the coffins of our own dead military, but we'll lap up the feel good convocations and mass hysteria, all the while conveniently missing the real stories within this story, that mental health issues and gun laws are criminally ignored in this country. The underlying message that mentally ill people are evil and not to be trusted. How about writing about that?

supersoling said...

Ah...you're screening the comments now. Interesting. While I don't blame you for the desire to weed out the truly offensive, like David Byron, there's something squirmy about this.

The Blogging Curmudgeon said...

Unfortunately, comment moderation has become necessary. I have a stalker or two who wants to post trollish comments, including one with personal information that shouldn't be divulged.

The Blogging Curmudgeon said...

The Cho video could have been aired at a later time (he actually sent a dozen or so Quicktime videos to NBC)--say a month or a few months after the actual shooting? Showing the videos while the tragedy was still unfolding was a whorish grab for ratings, not a move to fulfill some requirement of the story.

I agree that most Americans don't want to see video of our victims in Iraq and elsewhere. Just not good for the ratings. However, DEAD AMERICANS always mean big ratings. Everybody knows American lives are worth far more than the lives of "furriners".

Anyway, it's a bit hard to worship U.S. Marines if you should them shooting a wounded, helpless captive in the head. Oh wait, no it's not...they actually showed that video during the scourging of Fallujah and it didn't dent the "hero" image of the U.S. Marines at all.

America does love its cold-blooded killers, both as heroes and as villains. I think we should change the name of the country to Itchy and Scratchyland, "The Violentest Place on Earth".