The Peacock and Virginia Tech

I awoke this morning to find various talking heads discussing how outrageous it was that NBC chose to air footage of Cho Seung-Hui's rambling diatribe the night they received it. The CNN production team put together a nice little package of the parents pleading with numerous news organizations to stop showing the clips. And all of the meadia members of the panel, except one, agreed. I don't remember much of what happened after that because my brain exploded.

Towards the beginning of the Iraq war, the Pentagon announced that it was going to severely limit the media's access to the coffins of soldiers which had been sent back stateside. The press, rightly, was up-in-arms over the decision. The journalists realized that, no matter how hard those images might be for the families to swallow, the world had a right to see the consequences of war. Furthermore, they also understood that some percentage of the population also wanted to witness it. Simply, the media recognized that deaths resulting from a conflict thousands of miles away was news, and they had a right to document it as such.

Flash forward to the events of this week. NBC received a package in the mail from the man who went on the the largest shooting spree the U.S. has ever seen. Knowing that people would want to see it and tune it, they put it on the air. As Brian Williams said, "By just about any definition, this is news," and they presented it as such. NBC and its cable outlet, MSNBC, made an editorial decision that at no time would the video and pictures take more than ten percent of an hour. And the watchdogs who keep track of these things seem to indicate that they followed this self-imposed standard. In other words, it was not in some sort of 'loop,' as many critics contended.

The whipping NBC has taken since it made its decision appears to be nothing more than a smoke-screen to cover up the harder truth that people are too shy to confront: Victims of a tragedy have no right to attempt to set the news agenda. They have every right to ask people to grieve with them, but they can not be allowed to tell people what is news. And, I'm sorry, but those tapes and pictures are just that. At the very least, the packet tells the story of what happens all too often when people with severe mental infirmaties are not taken care of by the system. While I can certainly understand why it is hard for the families to understand, other Americans do see it as newsworthy and have a right to have it at least presented to them.

The legal system recognized a long time ago that victims should at times be some of the last people to influence certain decisions. It's the reason that criminal trials are stylized, "State of .... versus....," rather than "Person X versus Person Y." Objectivity should rule the legal word, and journalism as well.

Taken to the logical conclusions of what the Tech families are saying, should the History Channel stop airing World War II footage, because we still have Holocaust survivors? Should every single bookstore in America be picketed because they have a copy of Mein Kampf on their shelves? Should Apocalypse Now and The Deerhunter not be lauded, because they were made so soon after Vietnam? Should the news just stop covering the Iraq War?

The answer is of course not. The world has a right to see what influences and shapes the events around them. While one may not personally care for it, that does not mean it fails to shed light and understanding about what happened. And truth be told, I shudder to think of a media which bases all of its content on what people like.