SABREOCRACY.NET (formerly SIVACRACY.NET)

i suggest you move to cuba if you don't like the way this country works. get real.

Thank you so much for this wonderful commentary. I just recently emailed MSNBC for their insensitivity in plastering pictures of this young man with guns pointed all over the front page of their website no less than 36 hours after he took the lives of 32 people-for them to continue to glorify this man through their actions is reprehensible, and I truly appreciated your comments about their decisions.

Thank you for writing this. Thank you.

I thought your article tonight on MSNBC was right on target. For me, yesterday afternoon, I was apalled (sic) when I saw the MSNBC.com "breaking news" ticker indicate that NBC was in receipt of the Cho package, and then drip-drip, as the minutes went by, updates that this "exclusive" would be aired on the NBC Nightly News. I haven't tuned into NBC News for sometime (neat, it's now in HDTV. Wow.), but this got my attention -- and the result to me was that it was akin to pornography. I wanted to take a chemical shower after viewing the opening sequence, and listening to Brian Williams obligatory "we agonized over our decision to show this to you ... but enough of that, here it is" pre-amble, and his blog posting that this was "the killer's manifesto" seemed to only serve another attempt to give the whole thing added gravitas.

For an interesting take on NBC's decision, and also the opinion I share, as well as an indication at the indignation and contempt many of us hold with NBC News, read (of all things) ProFootballTalk.com. Yes, it even bled through to ProFootballTalk.com. >> http://www.profootballtalk.com/rumormill.htm

The post appears 1/3 down the page ... I reprinted it here >>

A QUICK ASIDE

We weren't going to say anything further about the Virginia Tech shootings. We spoke our mind on the topic the other day.

But one of our friends in the real media sent us an e-mail this morning asking whether we think NBC should not have aired the videos and photos of Mr. Cho that had been mailed to the network before he died.

We hadn't really thought about it, primarily because we only watch MSNBC. And they'd never raised the question.

Imagine that.

In our view, the stuff should have been handed to the cops and never mentioned on the air. Cho is urinating on the graves of his 32 victims, and NBC is enabling it.

It was, we believe, the ever-present lure to be "first" or "exclusive" that prompted NBC to make such a big splash. Only a day after Keith Olbermann explained on ESPN Radio that his Tuesday night edition of Countdown would not be completely devoted to the Virginia Tech tragedy because there is other news to be discussed (or something like that), Olbermann's entire show on Wednesday night focused on the event that has allowed NBC to inject itself directly into the story.

But this isn't journalism, folks. It's called opening the mail.

NBC News president Steve Capus (who has had more air time in the past week than Brian Williams) made a rash decision, and a bad decision. Apart from the issue of creating copycats, NBC is rubbing the murders in the faces of the friends and family of the victims.

It is wrong. The more we think about it, the more we believe it.

Hopefully, some of the same forces that ran Don Imus off of the air last week will lobby Russell Dalrymple (or whoever it is that runs the show over there) to give Capus the heave-ho, too. (While we're thinking of it, has Capus or anyone else within the executive wing been held accountable for allowing/leaving Imus on the air in the first place? It's not as if the I-man said something out of character.)

We sense that, over time, there will be a backlash against NBC. Down the road, the powers-that-be might realize that, by wrapping their arms (and legs) around the disturbing images and words of Mr. Cho, the network has acquired a stain that can't be washed off by the 24-hour news cycle.

Along those same lines, that stark "NBC NEWS" logo/advertisement that has been plastered onto the pictures will make it even harder for the network to eventually distance itself from Cho.

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Network news, like cable news long ago, has now "jumped the shark". Brian Williams, Katie Couric, et al -- find something else to do with your lives.

Im glad someone wrote that!

Furthermore Im outraged that they would air the photos videos and EVEN mention his name. This sets up the scene for other copycats that will sit in front of the TV and see all the "glory" this guy is getting and one day they will want to go out with a bang and live in infamy also. They see the oresident talk about him, TV Anchors, famous people etc...others will want to go out like this!!

At baseball games they dont show images of people that run onto the field they turn the cameras and dont even mention the persons name when they are arested, all so to avoid copycats...but when it comes to mass murders they would air the killings if they had it. The Blood is in the medias hands as these Office School Murders are essentially copycats from the past and glomorized on TV and the sick minds of these people feed into this and nex thing you know we have these shootings. Then the media has the balls to ask "WHY" this happened...its happened BECAUSE OF THE MEDIA!! thats a fact. And next time it happens you can blame this weeks media frenzy. from now on I bet they will always mail a package....

The media is disgraceful and should be held accountable!

With all due respect, I must disagree with the opinions expressed on MSNBC in your editorial. What have we to fear from facts? Yes, I'm sure that Cho's family has some extraordinarily negative feelings to reconcile, but avoidance of the facts isn't the answer. They have no specific rights to require that the information not be aired. Cho was a legal adult; any parental rights they might want to exercise dissolved when he turned 18.

If we (as individuals, and as a society) don't face the facts, if we don't face our feelings and learn to deal with them, how will we ever develop the skill? The world is not all sunshine and happy, fluffy bunnies. Allowing emotions to paralyze us, or avoiding "bad feelings" because they're uncomfortable, is not a mature response to the circumstances that life throws our way.

Besides, the public has a right to know what was going on. How can we learn from the experience if information is withheld? It's an ugly sight, certainly, but there's a lot of ugly in the world. We tend not to look at it, just because it's ugly. We put our fingers in our ears, close our eyes, and la-la-la until it passes from our immediate vicinity. It keeps us from having to answer the hard questions about how we treat each other, and how we relate to the world.

It's about time we stopped and took a good look at the ugly--if only so we can recognize it in ourselves and take steps to expunge it.

If that means watching Cho in his mad rants, then so be it.

The article implies that the release of Cho's image can lead to nothing constructive or helpful to our society or culture (unlike the Abu Ghraib photos) and therefore should not have been released by NBC. This seems highly contradictory to the "open source" ideology of this blog. The disrespect comes with how the information is used not by the release of the material. Understanding all the information about this crime is very helpful to our society (this positive effect however is not as evidently clear as the negative effect of a bad taste mashup on youtube), it's a shame that the pop culture of the internet (or the media tabloids) will not be able to control themselves with how they use the material, but it goes with the open source territory, which we are still learning to handle. Finally the tragedy of the event as specific to the families and school did not end that morning when the last shot was fired, it will manifest itself in different forms which everyone will need to accept (like these photos). The article states the negative usage of the photos warrants their censorship, I'm not quite sure.

I did not call for censorship. I called for restraint and better judgment. My position is reinforced by the fact that the videos contain no "information" at all. If they did, NBC should have and would have transmitted that information to us. Instead, the videos contain nothing but rage. We learned nothing. We understand Cho and his actions no better today than on Monday. He was merely incoherent.

So the release did not enrich our understanding of anything. Instead, it inflamed us, thus limiting our ability to think through this event.