maybe i am missing something because i have been looking at this stuff online...so i'll use a sentence from elphaba's last post to pose my question
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Horrific images were shown during the Walter Cronkite era of televised news, but never for salacious appeal and advertising dollars.
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how do you determined intent? what are you reacting to that indicates this was the motivation for showing the cho footage? was it used as a teaser for the evening "news" casts?
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NBC could have taken a similar high road by discussing the Cho material, rather than giving him a final audience.
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wait: now i dont knw what you are talking about at all: are you referring, say, to footage from vietnam? well, in the bizarre-o world of conservativeland, the place in which this notion of the "vietnam syndrome" advanced by that emptiest of signifiers, ronald reagan, has some semblance of traction, the problem with the vietnam footage was that it showed (gasp!) that in a war actual people actually die. the argument advanced through that emptiest of signifiers was that such indirect contact with some aspect of the reality of war--entertainment tho it was in a way---was somehow responsible for undermining "morale"--as if there is a separation between support for a war and any sense of what that war entails on the ground.
this is formally parallel to the argument that i have been making: showing the footage deflates the potential wider significance of what cho did. in a limited way, it demystified the action. since i am not concerned with "morale" but rather with ways that might conceivably stop such actions (war, murder-suicide on this model) i would support the demystification.
so if there is a problem with the position that i am outlining so far as i am concerned, maybe it would come from the way in whcih the footage was handled apart from (and maybe within) the actual "news" broadcast(s)...this seems to be the point around which positions diverge, and could be the element that i am missing here that prevents me from being able to understand where this "no no they sholdnt have shown it at all" comes from...so maybe someone could fill me in on what they found problematic about how the footage was handled (as opposed to that it was shown at all)?