Via Mark Levin, Drudge, etc., AP reports on the backlash against the media’s exploitation of the Cho tapes:
NEW YORK (AP) – With a backlash developing against the media for airing sickening pictures from Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui, Fox News Channel said Thursday it would stop and other networks said they would severely limit their use.
NBC News was the recipient Wednesday of Cho’s package of rambling, hate-filled video and written messages, with several pictures of him posing with a gun. Contents began airing on “Nightly News,” and its rivals quickly used them, too.
Family members of victims canceled plans to appear on NBC’s “Today” show Thursday because they “were very upset” with the network for showing the pictures, “Today” host Meredith Vieira said.
As I said, I can see the benefit of reporting about the package’s contents, and even making the material available online, at a later date, in order to take advantage of the dispersed knowledge of the public (it was a Virginia Tech professor who, after seeing the pictures, informed the New York Times of their similarity to the movie Oldboy). But the media, TV news especially, excercised absolutely no self-control when it came to repeatedly airing Cho’s sick self-portraits.
UPDATE: Allah writes:
The one argument I don’t find especially compelling is that they shouldn’t have “rewarded” him by running it. How did they “reward” him by exposing him as a complete, yammering lunatic?
Because his target audience wasn’t the rational people who find his rants so sickening. Cho was clearly speaking to other complete, yammering lunatics, his “children” and “brothers and sisters” for whom this video was supposed to be some sort of call to arms.
UPDATE II: Reader Barton J. Writes:
After listening to Steve Capus and others from NBC News explain why they chose to show Cho’s video in return for advertisers’ dollars it occurs to me that Don Imus simply should have waited a couple of weeks – he would have had a much more appropriate target for the term “hos”.