For some reason I had neglected to close the browser when I went off to make breakfast - - just restored from the back button ;)


I don't think you're being insensitive - I just think that, not having seen how the media handled the coverage puts you at rather a disadvantage when trying to comment on that coverage.

I didn't get to see ALL of the memorial yesterday because I was busy trying to convince a recalcitrant live truck mast to come back down from it's 50' height where it was frozen in place, but what I saw of the actual memorial itself was respectful. I noticed that all the cameras were on the periphery of the event - no photogs were getting in anyone's faces, and the announcer (I was watching the CNN feed) only broke in to tell the viewers who was speaking - no commentary that I heard.

Now, the rest of it, I'm right there with you. We don't need to drag the viewer along through the newsgathering process. It's OUR job to work the information over and over again until we have enough to tell you, and only then should we break in and tell you. The reason we don't is because of this idiotic desire to be first with everything - there's this stupid fear throughout our profession that if someone else beats us by as much as 10 seconds to giving you new information, that you'll change channels and never come back to us. I don't believe that for a minute, but there it is. Like I said before, tell us where we're screwing up. Get vocal. Write letters. Call us. Tell us how we can improve - -- most of us already know it, but we can't convince the bosses. You can.

I don't need to take a break to see how distasteful most of it is.

On a local level, you always find out about the deaths of the local soldiers. Always. You might not find out about the dead soldier from the neighboring state, but if he's a hometown kid, it WILL be on the news as soon as it's found out.


The criminal profilers aren't doing the job. This isn't an isolated incident. Society is becoming increasingly violent and insane. We MUST find out why, and act to fix the problem. And when I say we, I mean we as a society. We can't leave this to the "experts." They're the ones who got us here in the first place.

That's not what I meant at all. I want to get to the root causes of these incidents - not to prevent the individual incidents themselves but to stop these kinds of insane thoughts from happening in people in the first place. I have long suspected that the human race is slowly going insane - Every generation sees greater violence and depravity than the previous one. Ever more inexplicable acts occur on a more and more regular basis. We must find out why. I've said this before - personally I have a feeling the cause is environmental. The average person today is walking around with more than 600% of the amount of lead that was in the average person 100 years ago. Lead is a neurotoxin. It MUST be effecting us somehow. And that's only one of the hundreds if not thousands of chemicals we've exposed ourselves to - many of which we don't even know the effects. There isn't a surface on the planet now that doesn't have traces of Scotchguard on it. What's that doing to us? To our minds? We must examine incidents like this and find their root causes if we want any hope of surviving as a species. Maybe I'm wrong - maybe it's not chemical - but SOMETHING is causing people to go nuts more and more often. It cannot be allowed to continue unchecked.

it is very strange, this play of press coverage and "reality" in a situation that is traumatic. i found myself fascinated by the 9/11/2001 coverage because it seemed clear to me that the folk who make up this apparatus--the chain of information relay within the networks in particular, which is made up of human beings (which folk--including myself--tend to put aside behind the language of bureaucratic systems, across terms like "apparatus")
--these folk were themselves traumatized and were engaging in a bit of compulsive repetition as a way to neutralize the implications of what they were watching. so in that situation, i understood myself to be watching a breakdown of the normal type of coverage of death and so forth and its replacement with a kind of therapeutic ritual.
one asserts such control as one can over potentially damaging information by repeating it.
if the consequence of that repetition is the collapse of the meaning of an event back into the formal structures of the image, so be it, i guess.
what shakran has posted above is really quite interesting as in a strange way it dovetails into this idea that i have harbored about that particular phase of tv coverage.
(it is not the same interpretation, obviously--it simply dovetails into it)


on this shooting/murduer-suicide:
i find very strange indeed reports and emails that i have been getting about cranked up "security" at other campuses around the country in "response" to the vt shootings. what is that about? security at the art institute of chicago, for example, was tripled yesterday--cops everywhere. i do not understand this: it seems that administrations understand uniformed people as themselves therapeutic...all this in the interest of reducing the meaning of singularity, of arbitrariness, of uncertainty. this has bizarre political implications, when you think about it.
this perhaps for another thread....

Roachboy, it's almost certainly a combination of fear of the copycat effect and fear of the legal and media system. After one NYU student committed suicide by jumping off of their library, 3 others did it in the same year - so the copycat or lemming effect is real. If another incident happened at a school and there were no apparent precautions taken...it would go poorly for that institution in the media.

Yeah, I agree. We were all completely stunned, and honestly didn't know what to do - -so in that we were in the same boat as everyone else. We knew that we were telling people that the USA as they knew it was no more. That's a pretty heavy burden to have to tell someone. We were also grieving along with you, not only for the incident, but because many of our friends and colleagues died that day as well.

That one's easy. Just about every time something like this happens, some people decide to copycat it. Unfortunately, you never know where those people are, so you step up security everywhere to try and prevent it.

I saw an interesting article by a psychologist once on Columbine - -don't ask me to cite it because I can't remember where I found it, but it's message has stuck with me. Dylan and Kliebold got their 15 minutes of fame and then some because of what they did - - this psychologist theorized that at least in some of the cases, the shootings that followed were partially if not wholly motivated by this fact. Kid wants to be famous? Well one way to guarantee that is to become notorious.

This is just another incident like this - and some misguided kid somewhere might decide that he, too, wants to be famous. . .

i considered the copycat notion as an explanation but didnt find it terribly compelling: but it you add in external pressure/coverage and the usual terror university p.r. administrators fall into at the thought of potential damage being done to the institutions reputation, i suppose it makes sense.

but it nonetheless seems to me kind of hysterical, only imaginable as routine via the past 6 years of routinized hysteria. as if people in uniforms wandering about entrances to buildings could reasonably be expected to stop or even influence an event that they are only anticipating in the most general sense, with nothing to link it to any particularity. given that, there is no greater effect to be had from what amounts to the arbitrary deployment of people in uniform around entrances to buildings: they might as well be sitting at desks somewhere.

what bothers me about this is more indexical than literal: the acquiescence in the face of uncertainty to increased official security, as if that security apparatus can reasonably be expected to protect folk from uncertainty or randomness. there is something of an acquiescence to authoritarian rule in it.

television information has a curious side-feature, which is an effect of the medium itself, in that it reduces the world to an arrangement of objects and politics to the fact of that arrangement. so what is given, what is encountered visually in your everyday experience, is de facto posited as self-contained, self-legitimating. people do not make meanings, they find them. the political order within which we operate is co-terminous with the world of objects, and the world is nothing but objects. this seems to me a set-up for an exaggerated fear of uncertainty or instability, which is excerbated by the simple fact that ideological adjustment is pretty hard to imagine if your world is framed for you as a collection of things. so people get unnecessarily anxious when they are confronted with images of violence because all of it seems equivalent in that all of it is equally arbitrary--and its arbitrariness is demonstrated through its effects on objects (human beings are a particular type of object in this curious world we live in...)---so it is that people not only consent to bizarre shows of "security" but even seem to want them.

i dont know if this is clear: this line of thinking is a preoccupation in the writing that i do that is not for here....but it informs this sense i have that the vt shootings are resonating at some level with the past 6 years of routinized hysteria that was called the "war on terror"...

it would be more than passing strange were these resonances to be something more than logical connections.

It's very clear - what you write makes perfect sense. And you're right, the guards are ridiculous, but somehow reassuring in a myopic way.

In large part, the amount of money and effort expended on preventing terror attacks or whatnot is a measure of denial. You could stop an army, but you can't stop every instance of a couple of crazy guys, particularly if they are willing to die. Similarly, you might stop or shortcircuit a massive assault on a university, but you can't anticipate all the sick individuals out there. The guards (like the DHS, etc.) are an assertion by action that we refuse to believe this - as if this faith in action makes something true.

MM, your comments about what I see as an overreactive media ring true, but Shakran's points are equally valid. I would say that my opinion of the media falls somewhere in between the two.

I grew up in a house where the television was always on the news. I watched the first Gulf War live on CNN. I was probably the most informed fourth grader you could ever imagine. News was everywhere in my house--one newspaper subscription, several newsmagazine subscriptions...if it happened, I knew about it. Would I say I was overexposed? No, not at all.

I think the OJ Simpson trial ruined us, really, and Court TV. Certain cable outlets began focusing on sensational news all of the time, and got ratings. Well, we see the result of that today in the media that now oversensationalizes everything.

I'm careful about where I get my news now for that reason. I read the NYTimes, both the online version and the paper copy. If there's a breaking story, I check their website, Google News, and CNN. I watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report daily. The only oversensational thing that has slipped through my nets is a picture of a dead body I didn't want to see. After Hurricane Katrina, the NYTimes printed a picture on their front page (their main web page) showing a dead man floating down the river in New Orleans. That may be a very truthful picture, but to me it's overly invasive. I don't need to see dead bodies; I can understand people died without seeing the carnage.

But regardless, I still see this as a tragedy. There's no denying that when people die, it's a tragedy. The more people die, and in a worse situation, it becomes a bigger and stronger tragedy. Perhaps we all have different ways of judging what constitutes a tragedy, but I think we can come to an understanding about that.

all i can say is, interesting time to be online in america lol.
(sorry doh)

Today's coverage is saying that the shooter was reported to administrators for his conduct and he was showing signs of violence for the past year. Apparently he stalked women and the authorities had to be called on a few occasions.
So, once again, like Columbine, the signs were there but did anything happen to prevent it? No.
He had a complete mental break and this was the result. Everyone who knew him saw it coming.
So what good is beefed up security? Once again, everyone is missing the point.

VA Tech
 

Since 9-11 it seems as though our Country has never been the same...

Just a senseless loss of students of the future work-world. Schools from elementary age students to college level are not safe to be further educating themselves.

My prayers are with their families, friends and fellow students of VT!

How can this endless loss of life be stopped? More security, but where are our freedoms?:expressionless: :sad:

Lone gunman, psychological problems. You will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER be able to stop a mentally ill person with a viable idea- as in, it can be done, if only because you're crazy enough to do it.

There are, what, 26,000 students at that one school? Do you have any idea how common depression is among people that age, or how common something like being jealous over a lost love? No one would have investigated a male his age who was showing signs of depression and anger because he broke up with his girlfriend and wanted her back. No one in their right mind would take more than a glance at that.

The very fact that such an event was unprecedented should tell you that there was no way of seeing this coming.

Saying that counselors, administrators, etc., should have been able to weed out underlying homicidal thoughts in a depressed, love-sick male is just ridiculously unrealistic.

Here's why this keeps coming up, though- and I know i've said it before in another thread some time ago:

PEOPLE REFUSE TO BELIEVE THAT MENTAL ILLNESS CAN CAUSE A PERSON TO KILL RANDOMLY, AND WITHOUT APPARENT PURPOSE. Why? Because that would be a scary thought, wouldn't it? You want to believe there was a real reason, that there was a series of events that preceded it and could have been seen ahead of time.

But NO. Sometimes, people just do bad, bad things because they're mentally ill. No one will admit to it and allow it as reality... they MUST blame something, or someone.

Nonsense.

The guy was mentally ill, snapped like a twig, and went on a rampage. There's no loss of support. There are no overt warning signs. There's just a killer. People need to wake up and smell the chemical imbalance.

Analog, I agree with much of what you have posted, except there is an additional twist that applied in this situation and many others. Many people came forward to express concern about this student, but they were unwilling or unable to take the next step. The female students chose not to file a complaint against him for stalking. The administration's hands were tied because he never made a specific threat to harm himself or others.

There was a precedent in 1962, Link , but this merely reinforces how rare college campus attacks have been. Of current concern is the copycat wannabe's that are making threats across the nation.

Under current law, this individual could not be brought in for a psych evaluation without his permission, let alone be temporarily hospitalized. If we are discussing how this might have been prevented, I believe it begins when he first drew attention by his writings. I am seriously torn about the idea of involuntary hospitalization that goes beyond the current statutes.

I agree, if someone snaps like that, doesnt seem like much anyone could do about it. They said he floated his way through the system by being a quiet, low-key kid. How common is a quiet, sullen, angry teenage male anywhere in the world? This became a unique case when the guy recorded his madness for the whole world to see. Pretty dark stuff.

Heh... as soon as you said '62, I knew what you were linking. By "no precedent", I mean there's nothing like it that's happened before. The only similarity between this and Whitman back in '62 is the setting, and the nutbar factor.

Also, stalkings are useless reports. You have to get proof of it first, and even then... the overwhelming majority line from police is "until he does something, we can't do anything" (unless you're a celebrity). At best, someone may have gotten a restraining order. Killing 32 people and injuring another how many doesn't sound like a guy who'd pay any attention to a piece of paper that says to keep back x feet.

It's not like if the stalking victims had come forward, he'd be in jail right now. If anything, there might have been more personal revenge bloodshed before the mass killings, if he'd had charges filed on him.

And again, I'm sure people come forward about disorderly, depressed, or odd behavior. Hindsight is great- if you asked any of those people prior to the incident, I don't think a single one of them would have said he was nearly disturbed enough to do this. If there was real evidence, like someone saw his threatening writings, then that's separate- planing on killing people is a punishable offense, and if someone didn't report it, then we're talking about a crime going left unnoticed.

The problem is, we live in reality... where people's confession letters of hate and anger and bloodlust aren't discovered until after the deed is done, and counselors don't (and reasonably so) assume every depressed/upset college student is a homicidal maniac.

"...he never made a specific threat to harm himself or others." <- You hit the nail on the head, right there. :) Like I said... hindsight and ass-coverage... if you were an administrator there and a student made no threats against himself or others, but was depressed and seemingly angry, and you brushed him off- then he killed 32 people... would you REALLY tell the news people, the whole world, that you brushed him off? Or would you say your hands were tied to act because he didn't specifically threaten himself or others?

People do not rehearse their story before the story even exists, that happens only after 32 are dead and the finger-pointing starts up. :)

Uh...Whitman murdered his mother and his wife before he went to the clock tower, another simularity. Also: increasing behavior problems in both the Marines and college; eh...it's all there in the link if you choose to read it.

No, it is NOT 20/20 hindsight, nor is it CYA. That is the freakin' law. I thought I made that clear near the end of my post. Did you read beyond "1962" ?:orly:

There's an old Japanese proverb that goes something along the lines of 'the nail that sticks out is the first to get hammered down'.

If we are more readily-able to detect the effects of deppression in our fellow neighbors,
then maybe we are more likely to contain the negative response that might stem from such mental illnesses.
Then, a chance could arise that we will be able to effectively reduce such horrific occurences as this one.

Tiger Bunny, I think there was much more than depression at work here because depression turns inward. This kid was ill in ways that go far beyond depression.

(I love your bunny) :D

I'm well aware, you misunderstood (or I wrote it weird). He didn't present danger to himself or others, therefore they could not hold him, by law. What I was saying in the "20/20 hindsight" department was related to brushing off a seemingly depressed college student (there are tons of them) and then the later different between saying you brushed him off or saying you couldn't do anything. He wouldn't have been brushed off if he exhibited any behavior that would allow lawful involuntary admission to a hospital facility. Since he didn't actually make any threat to himself... brushed off with the rest.

The physician's report on his evaluation back in December 2005 (so, over a year ago, not exactly "recent"):

http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2007/images/04/18/cho.pdf

In plain english, for those who want it:

That, right there, is a wholly unremarkable, very normal, completely uninteresting profile of a kid who is simply depressed, but not suicidal. Nothing special whatsoever.

From everything I've heard of his latest behavior, he added a little anger from the breakup (also totally normal) and stalked some girls.

Stalking (if it was proven- innocent until proven guilty, even if you're dead) has nothing to do with homicide, whatsoever.

Everyone can say it could have been prevented, could have "seen it coming"... but really, there's nothing to suggest it in the facts.

Depression statistic:

"Depressive disorders affect approximately 18.8 million American adults or about 9.5% of the U.S. population age 18 and older in a given year."

You take the first 9.4 million, i'll get started on the other half. If you find any homicidal maniacs, let me know. :)

Then we'll go after the 10 to 15% of all teens who show some signs of depression at any given time.

I did misunderstand your meaning (or you wrote it weird). :D This kid managed to not cross the line that would have caused an intervention. I think we will learn much more when the family comes forward. He has a sister with a PhD (I think) from Princeton, and he goes to VT. The gap between high school graduation and his current standing at VT doesn't add up, either.

Analog, I have to completely disagree with you when you say "stalking has nothing to do with homocide" ---it HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH HOMOCIDE.
Do you know how many women are killed or assaulted by their abusive partners who stalk them after they leave because they dared to usurp their control?
Can you say restraining order?
And this guy was stalking women he never dated....he was stalking women online and subsequently at the university. And the cops had been notified.
So yes, there were huge flags going up around this guy...even his english prof was afraid of him and had notified campus police.

I was fairly certain a schizo-affective disorder was in play, but after seeing the NBC video of his rant, I think this may be full blown paranoid schizophrenia. If so, there would be years of diagnostic symptoms that should have been identified and treated. Perhaps this could have been prevented, which increases the tragedy in my mind.

quicky correction - charles whitman did all his crazy shit on august 1, 1966...

quicky question - what dumbass at nbc decided that it was alright to put that video on the airwaves for hundreds of thousands of impressionable teenagers and other assorted whack-jobs to see? someone has taken leave of his senses, common and otherwise!

It seems to me there were a lot of people asking "why" and now they are mad at the messenger that had the answer to the question

i agree with shani on this, but would go further:

my reaction to information about/clips and images from cho's video and the accompanying manifesto was the opposite of uncle phil's above...the massacre was obviously disturbing in itself and it follows that anything remotely like an "explanation"--especially particularlized through cho himself in full regalia doing a kind of pantomime of "terrorist" videos--was also bound to be disturbing. but i think it absolutely should have been shown.

the persecution/martyrdom complex at the center of it is pretty obviously pathological, but not everything that cho processed through this complex was or is.
he in a way held up a very disturbing mirror that shows a combination of broad socio-political problems that are endemic to the american socio-economic order AND a very particular image of an individual who reacted in an incoherent, inarticulate and ultimately murderous way to these problems...these two general elements were self-evidently tangled up in a bizarre way as a function of his particular psychological state.
if there is a problem with this, then, it lay in the fact that the "explanation" simply compounds ambiguity--what are "we" (viewers, readers, spectators in general) supposed to do with this information?
on the other hand, what were "we" expecting? something to make us feel better about this? from the guy who did the killing? how is that reasonable? the action was obviously inspired by the possibility of giving all of us something that COULD NOT be resolved into anything that made any of us feel better about anything.

but the information should nonetheless have been aired: information has no necessary therapeutic function for those who take it in. there is no such requirement, nor should there be one.

there's another way of seeing this as well: if the concern really is copycat actions, it would seem to me that they would be *more* likely to happen the *less* information about cho is out there--this because the less information that is made available, the greater the space for projections about him--and it seems to me that the condition of possibility for copycat action is projection--what another fucked up kid might IMAGINE to have been the motives and how that imagining could leave out as much as it includes such that an equivalent action might seem to make sense. showing cho himself would seem to me to erase something of that space for projection.

there's more to say, but i'll leave this here for now.

Is "homocide" the killing of gay people, or something? Because I'm talking about homicide. (/sarcasm)

Moving on, I stand by my original assertion. Stalking is not about homicide. Stalking is about coveting, and it's about obsession. Often, it's part of a larger scheme within the mind of the stalker. They want to know everything the other person is doing for purposes of controlling their life. This notion of "control" is totally separate from stalking, the stalking just because a tool to carry out the other portions of their psychoses.

Your example of men who are abusive and then stalk their female (ex-?) partners only links because who already have homicidal intentions, anger, and control issues, can also be stalkers.

What you're asserting is a logical fallacy of association, much like saying "all people who drive cars, drive Ford Mustangs" when in fact the correct statement would be, "All people who drive Ford Mustangs are driving cars."

No, stalking has nothing to do with homicide- that does not mean that stalking, in itself, cannot be yet another tool that controlling, dangerous people can employ.

Just because the psychological phenomenon of stalking includes coveting and obsession, and a person who has control issues and is homicidal happens to covet and obsess over someone, does not make the two mutually exclusive.

Bravo, I agree.

Of course, I also believe that it ties in directly to what I was saying before; people refuse to believe that there is no "real" explanation, and they don't take psychological disorder as a real explanation.

They wanted a "why", what they got is precisely why, but the "why" is psychosis- paranoid delusions of persecution and martyrdom. Watching the tape is paranoid schizophrenia 101.

But no one wants to accept that people can do such a thing for "no reason" (chemical imbalance in the brain). They're looking for parents who beat him, they're looking for sexual assault as a child, they want a royally screwed-up past and bad upbringing to put a nice little bow on the whole thing.

Well, I'm sorry to say, there's no nice little bow going on this. The guy was mentally ill, and that's that. It did, in fact, happen for no reason whatsoever.

Can we all move on, now?

Roachboy, for the very reason that you stated that there was nothing for any of us to gain from this coverage, I take the opposite stand that this should not have been aired. Cho admired the Columbine killers and they had massive news coverage as well. Any wannabe's will also look to maximize the carnage to ensure greater coverage and now they know they can have their moment of righteous glory. If it were allowed, it would be pictures of Cho's blown off face aired to tell how these actions will always end.

Additionally, when does the media stop traumatizing the VT students and their families? What about other children across the country that are fearful and holding classes in lockdown? Nothing can support NBC's decision to air that crap, and it appears they have brought an uproar upon themselves for their choice.

there is no bad publicity elph. sure, they'll take shit for it, but we'll be watching. we'll be watching their ads. we'll be checking to see if they put out a remix.

Weird how it's really becoming Natural Born Killers.

I know you mean the universal "we", but I stopped watching broadcast news years ago for less reason than this.

Cynthetiq, I never saw Natural Born Killers so I don't understand your reference. Would you explain, please?

elphaba: consideration for the families apart--which i underestimated yes---i dont see what you are saying. as for "going out in a final blaze of glory" as an idea, there are dozens upon dozens of films that outline the same logic, so it hardly seems plausible that the circuit of information upon which cho relied was restricted to what he said explicitly in his infotainment package.

the kids who murdered their neighbors at columbine didn't invent anything and they are hardly the only circuit through which someone who decides, for whatever fucked up reason they might develop, might get the idea to go out dillinger style. i would go further even and argue that one possible reason why cho was able to identify with these folk is because he was able to impute his own narrative to their actions, make them over in his own image: had infotainment of the same order been left by them, maybe showing that would have erased that possibility. but then again, maybe not. there's no way to know, really. so i only go on what seems logical to me.

at another level, there is a history of some 40 years now of people who find themselves in overwhelming assymterical political situations of routinized oppression who feel powerless and impotent and without recourse who have chosen to do blwo themselves up as a political act--with far more lucid explanations for why they acted so----and THOSE are the explanatory elements left behind that networks choose routinely not to air. THOSE you dont see. why? i would argue because the expressions of political views are lucid in some of them and so THESE would be the elements that might engender more instances of this type of action.


another way: i think that showing these clips would dissuade potential copycats simply because the kid was in the main incoherent, and showing the material functions to strip away whatever glamour one could possibly associate with this action. like i said, there is no way to say that everything cho reacted to was simply spun out of his head, at the same time the obviously pathological way in whcih he interpreted those elements seem to me to deflate any political significance he might have imputed to his own actions.

it doesnt really matter to me that among the results of showing it is the piling of ambiguity atop ambiguity. there is no way to avoid it in a situation like this--they do not have neat endings.

An interesting movie. I haven't seen it in some time, but here is something from wikipedia

Thanks, Cyn. I also looked it up at imdb. Link

"The media made them superstars."

exactly.

i've done my best to keep myself from getting sucked into it all. it's not been easy as today i snuck a peek at one of the videos of the young man. so i know he's asian and mental. I could have told you that from the headlines of the newspapers I walk past, The only thing that has been added i can tell you so far and he annunciates his words funny. whatever.

Anything for a buck in the media.

Roachboy, I agree with much of what you said so perhaps one of our differences is how we view the potential "wannabe" or the "copycat." I would argue that those that would be attracted by Cho's act are no longer relating to their world of upper middle class America, in a rational fashion. In this case, my thinking rests with an individual's irrational response to the cultural environment. Simply stated, it would not matter that Cho was logically incoherent to that specific group of people.

I believe you have extended the argument to other world cultures and circumstances, wherein the individual is making a rational response to an irrational environment. Am I close to the distinctions we are making? You express your thoughts far better that I do, and I continue to stumble my way toward clarity.

PS: Should I be concerned that I found coherence in Cho's diatribe? :paranoid:

roachboy, where do you come from?

Am I the only one besides Phil that thinks that airing ANYTHING that Cho sent was foolhardy, wrongheaded and a major tactical error by NBC? We now have a road map for greivance airing for any nutjob with a gun/bomb/pipewrench and a camera. If I were the head of NBC News, I would have turned it over to the police/FBI/whoever and made a public statement that we'd done so and would not be used as a conduit for acts such as this.

As it is, NBC now looks like a bunch of tools. And yes, I mean to use the double meaning.

Cho may have been crazy, but he wasn't stupid. Neither were the kids at Columbine. The next one that comes along (and there will be a next one, regardless of anything anyone does) will now have a way to live in infamy.

elphaba: thanks for the kind words about the writing....


yeah see therein lies what i take to be the central ambiguity about all this, the thing that makes folk uneasiest, the thing they want to see made to go away. in this case, i am inclined to think that without seeing the clips, there is a way in which an answer this question would become impossible as the matter would be undecidable. what you make of this at a certain level turns on how lucis you imagine cho to have been--the more lucid, the more a reaction to a pathological environment it can become. the less lucid he is understood to have been, the more problematic this move becomes.

emile durkheim wrote a book called "suicide" in the late 19th century--a sociologist--he posed an interesting question: given that we as humans are geared aroudn adaptation or accomodation of our context, how would we know if that context had become pathological? the implication is that we really wouldnt because our frame of reference would move along with the wider social context, to a significant extent. he points to spikes in suicide rates as an index--he posits a notion of anomie or sense of drift and displacement as a cause. this argument works best if the information you look at is aggregated, a simple numerical index because it implies that suicide can be seen as a reasonable response to an pathological environment.

can you say that an environment--a culture--is a single entity and so can be or not be pathological as a whole?
wouldn't it more or less always be the case that what this environment is is a function of the position you occupy within it, that from a position of being-dominated things would look one way while from a positin of domination it would look another? particularly if you think about the simple fact that not all positions shaped by domination explicitly involve the acts of domination--you might think about significant aspects of globalizing capitalism--from an american viewpoint, a middle class relatively stable american viewpoint, the system looks ok, while from that of someone working some shit job in one of these "free zones" it really is not ok. the midle-class viewpoint is contingent on all kinds of factors that amount to domination, but most folk do not participate in it or even see it...

so anyway, one result of thinking across aggregates like durkheim does is that it generates a sense of lucidity of motive behind the numbers of suicides. like these folk are the canaries in the mineshaft. it seems to me that this could easily get mapped onto a political framework IF the view of those who committ suicide are left as those which you construct across numerical indices.

things look otherwise if you go into the details.
that's another way of saying the same thing about why i think it was not a bad decision to show the footage.

this leaves aside network commercial considerations, not because i think the networks great guys, but because in this case i think it fine to make a separation between general interests and those which shaped this particular decision to air this stuff. but that could go either way, and i agree with what you said about it.

ps: no, i wouldnt be concerned...

=================
phil: where do i come from?
saturn.

Did you miss post #126?

And the extension of that is I will kill you so no one else will ever have you.
And I will kill our children for the same reason. And yes, stalking has everything to do with homicide--because when men kill their partners it is part of an overall cycle of control, of which stalking is one of the manifestations, taken to the next level, is death....

[/QUOTE]Your example of men who are abusive and then stalk their female (ex-?) partners only links because who already have homicidal intentions, anger, and control issues, can also be stalkers.
What you're asserting is a logical fallacy of association, much like saying "all people who drive cars, drive Ford Mustangs" when in fact the correct statement would be, "All people who drive Ford Mustangs are driving cars."

No, stalking has nothing to do with homicide- that does not mean that stalking, in itself, cannot be yet another tool that controlling, dangerous people can employ.[/QUOTE]

Which can lead to homicide if the perpetrator has a psychological break, which, unfortunately, happens a lot. The worse case scenario, VA Tech, the least worse, suicide.

[/QUOTE]Can we all move on, now?[/QUOTE]

No we can't, because unless we start to take mental health issues seriously, and begin to address them before the shootings begin, this will happen again, and again and again.....

why is it when someone does something bad one of the first things another person asks is something similar to "what did his parents do to them"

I did a lot of shit when I was younger (didnt kill anyone) but you know what? when I got myself straightened out the first thing I would tell anyone was it had nothing to do with my "parents" it was things and situations I put myself in....they didnt do it.

For all we know his parents may have been as scared or disturbed as other people were (and I mean teachers, female aquaintances etc)

On a note about the parent's influence, I advise anyone who thinks parents are always to blame to read the letter on this page.

I don't have much to add to this thread, only to say that it's our focus on violence and our belief that violence is increasing that brings about such events.

In order to agree with you on this point, I would have to assume that the viewing public of broadcast news is at least as knowledgeable as you are and able to neutrally assess Cho's communication. My expectations may be to low, but I am certain that your expectation is to high.

I fully agree with Durkheim's proposition as you presented it. I am unwilling to extend his theory of suicide to mass homicide. Suicide is the removal of self from the irrational environment; homicide requires a mindset that many others must die as well.

Well stated, and I agree that there is little uniformity of culture/environment in our country and others. Two blocks can make the difference between wealth and poverty. The relative sense of dominance and one's position on that continuum will relate to many other issues, but can't be assumed to be causative.

Again, this assumes a close relationship between suicide and homicide that extrapolates to the general or the particular.

But Cho is an individual, and therefore, a "detail" in a search for a wider context.

I agree, Shani. This young man's problems are clinical, rather than social in my opinion. A case of nature, with less emphasis on nurture. But the family situation is unknown to us, so we shouldn't try to be guessing either way.

No one in this thread said anything about the parents being to blame, so I'm not sure where that line of commentary seems to be coming from. I said the general public is looking for it, not that there was anything to find.

I have no idea, you'll have to ask the people who point those fingers. I'm similarly confused why it happens every time.

Though, to be fair, there are many psychological issues that people have that are largely developmental in nature and manifest themselves specifically because of things like abuse (sexual or physical), so it is in those circumstances that I may question the parents. But this is obvious, and has nothing to do with parents.

Just because nothing was said doesn't mean nobody was thinking about it, analog ;)

I was saying that because I thought my statements about "people looking for" were misconstrued as "I'm looking for". :)

I know there's a lot of varying opinions about whether or not Cho's videos should have been shown, so I'll weigh in with mine. Two friends of friends were killed on Monday, I drove 550 miles yesterday to visit Blacksburg and say goodbye, and the media presence is overwhelming to use just one word. Smothering might be a better one.

You can't even breathe on campus without cameramen following you at the moment, let alone trying to grieve. Not all of the disturbed or unstable young kids will view the video as a call to arms, but I don't think it will dissuade any. The ones who are disturbed enough to do it will do it anyways, with or without the video.

That being said, if they're going to do it anyways, why show the video? Why not show the video? It's an incoherent rant from a very unstable young man, but it doesn't help the healing process at all. Nobody I know who has watched it was glad they've done so, not one person got something useful out of it. Either way, it's out - no putting it back in the bottle. :(

I take issue with this. We are not here to help you heal. We are here to give you the facts, even if you don't like them. That video is a material fact to this story. The networks ran it in one newscast, and now that they've done that, they're planning to severely limit showing any of it again - in other words, if an editor wants to use a clip from the video, he'd better have a damn good reason. I don't think they're being irresponsible here. I'm sorry that the video is disturbing -- - you won't get any argument from me on that. But sometimes disturbing things happen and it's unfortunately for all of us our job to tell you about them. Don't look to the news to heal yourself - you need to find your own way to heal.

shakran is absolutely correct: if there's one thing, just one thing, that the news is NOT all about, and never has been, it's healing.

I'd bet you anything, though, that once the immediate grieving is over (I mean come on, it's only been a few days, we're jumping the gun if anyone thinks anyone is near close to "done" grieving), those that saw the video will at least have a "why".

It's the number one thing asked, screamed, yelled to the heavens- "why?"

This tells them why- and whether they acknowledge it now or not, they'll eventually see it at least gave them the "why" they were looking for.

The fuck wanted to be noticed.


He got noticed.



End of story.

To weigh in briefly on the matter of the press: the video is information and qualifies as news. It sheds light on a question that almost everyone has been asking, and the fact that its message is less than reassuring - that its explanation of the killer provides no solace for us - is no reason to ask that it be kept from public view.

I do empathize with Pragma's description of the physical media frenzy now surrounding the campus. I wish those journalists could show a little more restraint, though having never worked in media I can't particularly comment on what it takes to produce information and how that is reconciled with respecting people's right to a bit of distance and privacy.

But the news has not always been about invading the privacy of those who are grieving. Even though this "we" may like to watch it...I think it's loathsome and I'm not surprised that those who support this kind of media hoopla don't even address that when responding to Pragma's post.

And I'm not particularly inclined to believe that anyone is looking for "answers" or a way to heal from this when they watch the news. They are looking for distraction and information and then they go and share that information with other people who are also looking for distraction and information. It's called gossip.

Or we can just keep considering ourselves more "well-informed" or "better off." :rolleyes:

Sorry, didnt meant to imply you had said it, I just meant "in general" lots of people "other places" have been having that rant for a few days

Sorry for being vague on that respect then, I didn't mean that people are looking to the news to heal - it's just hard to do so much as venture out in public without being blanketed at all times by the images. Seeing the video get aired was also not a fun experience for a lot of people. Either way, I didn't mean to offend and I apologize. I'm a little too close to the issue to talk about it rationally, so I'll just lurk in this thread.

Herein lies the problem of showing the video.
Talking about him so much on the news.
Showing so many pictures of him.
Calling him by his first name as if they know him (this was being done on CNN).

Just lie The_Jazz said
Why does someone do something like this?
I am thankful that I don't really get it but aside from revenge I am positive that those who do this do it to be noticed...to be remembered...for infamy.

Anyone contemplating such an act now knows that they will be a celebrity. The world woll take notice. Their name will be read over and over again. People will try to find reason in the actions taken and, as a result if reasons are surmized, give creedence at some level to these actions.

What should we do in these cases?
I am not sure, but after mentioning the persons anme the first time on the air or in print maybe it should not be used again. Maybe just refer to the person as the killer or murderer.
Maybe after first showing the persons picture it should not be showed again and again.

Obviously it would have no effect on a past action after the fact but maybe if you eliminate one of attracting factors (to the potential perpetrators) for suchs actions fewer of them will be carried out.

Maybe.

This guy got everything he wanted once he decided what his course of cation was.
- He wanted revenge
- He wanted notoriety
- He wanted to end it all

Mission accomplished.

Lesson learnt by others potential perpetrators:
- You can get your revenge-
- You can get your notoriety
- You can end it

The entire story and, even more, the images in question are published because they are great entertainment, particularly for the demographic groups that enjoy this type of thing enough to pay for it to be included in so much popular entertainment media content. Bloodlust and an infatuation with evil are some of the more predictable aspects of human psychology.

As for attempts to discuss contemporary media outlets as ever being motivated by a sense of personal, social, or cultural responsibility, they do appear as quite naive or simply motivated by urges of denial.

If there are some aspects of this situation novel enough to merit additional words, I would contribute to the discussion by saying it would be helpful if terms such as “rights, freedoms, free expression, and freedom of the press” were more generally regarded as operative only in contexts of personal, social, and cultural responsibility.

He called himself "question mark." Can I go around calling myself "semi-colon" ?

hit the nail right on the freakin' head, art...thanks...

We really. . REALLY, need a multiquote button here ;)

And to clarify, nor should it be. If something we show helps you heal, that's great, and trust me, not one of us in the media will begrudge that. However, our objective is not to heal, or to hurt you. It is to inform you. Sometimes information hurts, but the blame for that should be on the news maker, not the news reporter.

I'm not there, so I can't really comment too much, but I do know some media types who are there. From what I'm hearing, the media IS being respectful. No one's chasing grieving students down the street. They give them the chance to talk - if they say no, then they say no. I don't think there's anything wrong with asking if a victim wants to talk. It would be crossing the line to keep harassing them after they say no, but to ask in the first place is fine. Believe it or not I've actually had people who found that talking to my camera, getting their story out, was cathartic. Shocked the crap out of me the first few times it happened, but it's actually not uncommon for that to occur.

As for what it takes to produce a story (remember we can't just spew information - we have to tell you the story in a way that you will remember it later), it takes getting in close. Here, if you're interested, check out this video. It's the 2007 National Press Photographers Association's large market station of the year.

http://www.nasites.net/projects/1296/largestation.asp

As you watch the stories, think about how much less of an impact there would be if the camera were kept at a "respectful distance." You just can't tell a good story with the camera always far away. But you can get in close without causing undue upset - it just takes thinking with your heart instead of your reporter's notebook. I've talked to people who's beloved pets have just (15 minutes ago) been killed by a tornado, I've talked to people who just found out their kid died in Iraq, I've talked to all sorts of people experiencing immediate personal tragedy, and I always make sure I don't do any more damage than has already been done.

Granted, not all journalists have the desire or the experience to pull this off, but there are crappy workers in every profession. You don't judge the entire banking industry because one teller can't add - nor should you judge the entire news industry based on the crappy actions of a few.

It is equally naive to assume that all of us are just out to produce entertaining tripe.

OK. And what organization gets to decide when those freedoms can be applied then? Another way to ask that would be, how many government officials do you want on your Censorship Ministry?

I agree some of us have a conscience and a sense of responsibility.


I have no professional relationship to organizations or government officials that have some power to create Censorship Ministries. I never speak as if I do. I possess very little significant information about such things.

Why would I feel responsible to address things I have not said?

i would simply point again to my posts above where i tried to lay out arguments as to why it was a good idea to show the footage.

i do this because i think the arguments have not taken into account in subsequent posts: where does this "responsibility" lie and what does it entail? there is no agreement about how "responsibility" is to be framed in a situation like this.
responsibility on whose part and relative to whom?

that violence reduced to film footage is entertainment is not in question.
that this fact generates its own layer of ambiguity to *any* "news" coverage is also given.
but these statements hold across the board, are characteristics of the medium itself and of any relation to it characterized by spectatorship in a context dominated by repetition (of footage 1 ["action sequence" or "action sequence involving grief"] over news period x in the context of a 24 hour "news" outlet, say)
but left at this level, what this position entails is a claim that because there is no information, only entertainment, the "responsible" thing to do in such a context is essentially to create holes in the information stream. so that the index of a situation understood as "tragedy"=>a black screen.

if you take the possiblity of some nimrod deciding that (a) what really matter once you are dead is that you are famous and (b) this going-out-in-a-fiery-malestrom" seems like a good way to achieve this objective, then not providing information seems the surest way to invite that response simply because you leave the event entirely open to interpretations based on projection.

at this point, the argument segues into what i posted above and i wont retype it all. my posts are too long anyway. the upshot of it is that showing cho's footage, and by doing that making his motivations as particular as possible, showing the fucked up frame of reference he brought to bear on his own actions, would seem to me a way to *decrease* the likelihood that others would see in what he did a glorious matyrdom. and if that is anything like the case, then it would have been irresponsible for the networks NOT to show the footage. this action would probably have a more coherent effect in undermining the possiblity of copycat actions (i hate that term, but i am sure that no-one cares) than any number of campus shows of "security" which are effected by placing more uniformed bodies arbitrarily around buildings.

information is not therapy. it is not an element within a therapeutic situation. a therapeutic situation is quite specific. as cynical as i am about television as a medium, i just dont see any requirement at all, from any angle, that can or should militate for a conflation of television-based infotainment and a therapeutic function.

I am often naive and occasionally resort to denial, but in my lifetime the role of the news has not always been infotainment. The news was produced at a loss, and satisfied the licensure requirement of providing a community service. News didn't become a profit center until relatively recently.

Horrific images were shown during the Walter Cronkite era of televised news, but never for salacious appeal and advertising dollars. NBC could have taken a similar high road by discussing the Cho material, rather than giving him a final audience.

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

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?

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)?

Sure you did.

Who's definition of personal, social, and cultural responsibility are we going to go by here? It's nice to make broad statements like these, but if you look under their veil of wisdom you see they don't make a whole lot of sense. My idea of what is and is not personally, socially, and culturally responsible is quite different from other people's. Which of us is right, and who has the right to decide that?

In order to carry out what you say would be helpful, we would have to empower some group with that decision making process. Once we do that, we are setting the stage for censorship.

I don't see a point in trying to convince me I am saying something I do not intend to say.

For example, the fact that I see something as helpful has nothing to do with empowering some group to do anything.

Thanks for your comments but I see no value in pursuing a form of argumentation or debate.

I'm actually interested in what you think about the topics being discussed.

I have no interest at all in what you think I think.

Forgive me Art, but it seems to me then that you are simply spewing thoughts into a vacuum. You said what I quoted you as saying. Are you now trying to tell us that we aren't supposed to think anything of that? I asked you a question that had a direct relationship to what you said.

You said "it would be helpful if terms such as “rights, freedoms, free expression, and freedom of the press” were more generally regarded as operative only in contexts of personal, social, and cultural responsibility."

I asked you who gets to define those contexts. If you can't answer this, then what are we to conclude about what you said in the first place?

shakran, I consider your thoughts quite frequently. I am interested in understanding your point of view.

Yes, my words are intended as personal responses to personal observations. When I say some situation would be better, I mean that IMO it would be a qualitatively better situation if more people shared certain ideas.

I'm guessing that it's my lack of interest in effecting political solutions to things that polarizes you and me in some essential way. I suspect you are interested in political approaches and methods of getting things accomplished.

If these observations are the case it is understandable why you may see my statements as existing in a vacuum. In this sense I would agree with you.

I would simply add that I intend them to exist in a political vacuum.

I do not, however, intend my statements to be vacuous in other universes of discourse - such as thoughtful speculation, for example.

Thanks for the dialog.

I decided to stay out of this thread when it was still fresh in everyone's mind because I felt the wound was still too new for anyone to be objective about the situation. There was little information about Cho, the gunman, at the time, and as usual the rumors were being reported as fact in media. The same thing happened with the shootings at Columbine previous to Virginia Tech, when media reported things like the Matrix movies were to blame for the attack or even for the mental state of the shooters, which it turns out is utter fabrication.

Sociology professor Kenneth Westhues of University of Waterloo authored a fascinating essay on Cho which I feel is the most accurate character study available. Some of what follows is probably generally known, but the some of it may surprise you.

Virginia Tech Massacre, Seung-Hui Cho