In light of last week’s Virginia Tech tragedy, there has been an awful lot of disrespect and bad behavior by various interest groups who have sought to manipulate this terrible event to advance their own agenda. On the left you have gun control advocates and on the right there are anti-immigration supporters who jumped on the bandwagon to ignore the bodies and flaunt their grandstanding before the crime scene was secured.
But let’s reserve our highest scorn for the media, which continues to eat through the bottom of the barrel. NBC shamelessly used the killer’s paranoid and deranged video and photos to get attention for its flagging MSNBC franchise, and made sure the NBC slug (the logo on the bottom corner) was present so anyone could see which media source got the exclusive. Many of the victim’s family members correctly cancelled interviews with NBC to protest its poor taste, and NBC later pulled back on showing the video. Naturally that led to one of my favorite topics – the media doing an expose on itself to ponder if it has morals. The flak and backlash spilled into the newspapers as well, proving that no matter what you think of the American public, its morals are higher than the media that cater to them.
2007 is truly shaping up to be a banner year for the media to go beyond the realm of decency and highlight the importance of entertainment over substance. First, there were four funerals without a wedding – Gerry Ford, Saddam Hussein, James Brown and Anna Nicole Smith. That’s three people who changed the world and a gold digging bimbo. Who got the most coverage and attention?
Before it backtracked, NBC said the video and photos would have reached the public anyway. That’s true, but nobody would be surprised if a tabloid or anonymous web site broadcast the images first. Also, were the images newsworthy? That can and should be debated, but popular opinion and hindsight have now proven that airing a photo of a mass murderer pointing a gun at the newspaper reader or television viewer is not the way to start your day. Also, the killer's only desire was to immortalize himself by sending the pictures and video to the media and they played right into his hands, giving him exactly what he wanted.
By highlighting a killer’s deranged manifesto over showing respect for the victims, the media once again proves that entertainment and sensationalism trumps ethics and journalism. Get used to it and accept it, because it’s not changing.
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An opposing view by Jack Shafer
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