The Shame of NBC

April 19, 2007, 8:30 am; posted by Steve
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As much as I like any news organization (an admittedly low bar), I have liked NBC News. I like what they’ve done with their Dateline program lately, Catching Predators and Catching Identity Thieves and Catching Scam Artists, and basically just setting Chris Hansen loose to right Earth’s moral wrongs. I like justice; that’s why I occasionally watch ‘Cheaters’ and even sample ‘Jerry Springer.’ And they apparently liked justice too; I mean, they went to all the trouble to hire a group to rig GM trucks with model rocket engines, to ensure they blew up intensely enough so people would recognize the problem. That’s commitment.

But today, I am utterly sickened and disgusted by the exploitative and pornographic coverage, by NBC in particular, of the materials mailed out by the cowardly and insane Virginia Tech murderer, whom I will not name.

Heading to MSNBC for an update on the massacre? You’re in luck! You can check out the “full story,” “video coverage,” or — if those aren’t sufficient — something apparently altogether different called “full coverage.” Crave more info on the homicidal madman? Click on the “disturbing images” to see pictures from the killer’s “multimedia montage,” which, by the way, have you heard, he sent to NBC News in the middle of his killing spree? Oh, there’s another note about that! Right at the top, directly beside the horrifying shot of a psychotic, antisocial mass murderer brandishing the guns he used to kill his classmates. “Gunman sent message to NBC.” Ah yes. To NBC. How proud they are.

Of course it’s not just NBC at fault. As I write this, you can’t visit a major news site without facing that hideous specter brandishing a weapon at you. Fox and CNN have taken the unconscionable step of topping their sites with the killer pointing a gun directly at the viewer; perhaps they wish to spare families the horror of imagining the last thing their loved ones ever saw by simply re-creating it.

How are these pictures newsworthy? What is accomplished by an orgiastic frenzy of publicity for a man who embodied evil? Perhaps most importantly, what message does it send to others like him, straddling the edge of insanity and violence, craving the pulpit of posthumous fame? Doesn’t this encourage copycats, in a world where so many already seek notoriety for its own sake?

I want to know something, NBC, and Fox, and CBS, and CNN, and ABC.

Why the EXPLETIVE, three days after this antisocial piece of crap took two guns and ended 32 people’s lives, should I have to look at his smarmy, cocky, evil face every time I visit your site, rather than the faces of the innocent people whose lives he stole?

Why, if you must continue to talk about this tragedy, do you lead with his pathetic tale of loneliness and woe, his terrible plays and his freakish behavior, rather than telling me about the lives he ruined?

It took me a while to even find those names and stories. All the sites have them, but not at the top of the page. The top’s apparently reserved for the freakin’ lunatic.

So that’s why above this post, you found the names and ages of the victims.

They’re far more important.