New York – Did news judgment compel NBC and other organizations to use the material Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho intended for his epitaph? Or was this a case where revulsion should have left them in a desk drawer?
They’re tough questions for journalists, not made any easier by an apparent attempt by TV news organizations to have it both ways when the heat was turned up.
“This is the classic ethical issue where there could be multiple right answers and multiple wrong answers,” said Bob Steele, a senior journalism ethics faculty member at the Poynter Institute in Florida.
NBC News was at the tip of these issues when the photos, videos and written ramblings from Cho arrived in its mailroom Wednesday. Every other news organization faced the same questions when the material reached the public domain, and virtually all reached the same initial conclusion.
The pictures – 11 showed a gun pointed at a camera lens – were repulsive. Many who saw them viewed it as a second attack, an invitation to copycats and a fulfillment of Cho’s wish for attention.
Use of the videos and pictures served no compelling purpose and only risked heightening public disgust toward journalists, said Alex Jones, director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
NBC should have released transcripts of what Cho said, and maybe one still picture, and locked away the rest, he said.
NBC and others believed the information could help the public understand some of the reasons behind Cho’s rampage.
“You can’t say this has no news value,” said David Rubin, dean of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. “It does. It’s obvious to anybody who has been in the news business for a nanosecond.”
