By Staff
Thanks to the complicity of national news broadcasters, who made his manifesto video wallpaper, Virginia Tech's Media-Manipulating Mass Murderer (M4) succeeded at tormenting victims from beyond the grave.
The media showered M4 with the attention this cunning, crazy-like-a-Fox gunman craved.
Where's the restraint shown to communiques from Osama bin Laden?
Is M4 not a terrorist, too?
He was obviously influenced by cold-blooded Columbine creeps killing 13 in Littleton, Colo., on April 20, 1999. "Martyrs," M4 called 'em.
He wanted the spotlight and they rewarded him richly for ratings.
Bill O'Reilly ran the tape and said he would do so again because "evil must be exposed … you can see it in his face and hear it in his voice. All of us who saw the tape will never forget it."
Personally, I didn't need to see the tape April 18 to conclude it took a sick man to carry out something this horrible.
Shooting started at a coed dorm, Ambler Johnston Hall, around 7:15 a.m., leaving a woman and a man dead.
Two-and-a-half hours later the killing resumed across campus, where M4 chained the front doors of Norris Hall shut, then went methodically from classroom to classroom, killing 30 more people in the engineering building before taking the coward's way out.
The first e-mail alerting the campus of a homicide investigation didn't go out until 9:26 a.m.
Where did he go in between while police chased wrong hunches?
At 9:01 a.m. a package was mailed from a Blacksburg post office to NBC before M4 unleashed the fusillade that killed 30 people.
Thirty-six days before M4 went to a Roanoke gun shop, plunked down a credit card like the hedonistic rich brats he deplored and for $571 John Markell sent him on his way with a box of ammo and a Glock 19.
Eleven images of him pointing weapons at his camera amount to titillating pornography aired now.
It told me nothing I couldn't surmise already.
Law enforcement had already discounted the tape's investigative value.
M4 started buying guns in February, even though he'd been declared mentally ill by a judge and an imminent danger to himself and others.
Before the media rushes off to enflame a Second Amendment gun control debate, it ought to take a long, hard look at the First Amendment and media self-control because ordinary people were so angered by this barrage of images and all the other excesses like Anna Nicole and her baby's daddy that they would probably repeal freedom of the press in a heartbeat at this point.
Rather than enlightening us, the 24-hour media cycle is a tiring, ravenous beast that in one week dumped Don Imus (and innocent Duke lacrosse players) like a hot rock to stampede to Blacksburg and hold court on the lawn in directors' chairs.
By the weekend the beast needed to be fed again, Alec Baldwin.
Imus, whom most people had never heard of, landed on the cover of Time magazine wrapped in relevance, but it was like a 2007-in-review issue that scandal seemed so long ago.
An announcer on CNN offered the disclaimer that he felt queasy playing the taped private tirade against Baldwin's 11-year-old daughter, but he felt it necessary to make a point.
What point, he didn't make.
The public is talking about NBC's craven decision empowering copycats.
Kalamazoo Valley Community College closed both of its campuses to 13,500 students through the weekend because of provocative blog entries posted by a 26-year-old former student.
Yuba City, Calif., locked down April 19, affecting 17 schools and 12,000 students.
Classes were canceled at Catholic High School near Ann Arbor after police found the words "Virginia Tech today" scrawled on a bathroom wall.
There's a North Carolina high schooler who killed himself after aiming a gun at two others, eight buildings on a Minnesota campus evacuated in a bomb threat, a gunman at NASA.
On and on.
NBC News President Steve Capus vigorously defends his decision to air the tape.
"It was journalistically the right thing to do," Capus insisted April 22. "I believe we handled it as best we could. It was an extremely difficult decision and difficult process … but we took extraordinary steps to handle it in the appropriate manner. I hear people say we should have just put all of the written words out, which in my mind would have been much, much worse. We didn't publish his long, rambling, so-called manifesto. We held it back specifically for the reasons people are arguing about now. It was the right editorial call to only release a very small fraction of all this material that came in here. What we released was a photograph and videotape that showed someone on the edge, someone clearly about to boil over. To me, it's akin to what we're reading now about what he was writing in his English department classes. He had been planning this for such a long time. The videotape underscores that and I think it was representative of where he was."
"This didn't glorify him," Capus said. "The act that in his mind glorified it was the act that he carried out with those two guns."
"Sometimes good journalism is bad public relations," Capus said in response to Howie Kurtz's question on CNN's "Reliable Sources": "Do you think that some people out there don't understand that journalism sometimes involves publishing or airing things that some folks are going to find offensive?"
Capus recounted that they reached this decision on their exclusive, only after " 7 1/2 hours, all day long" of deliberation in which "we didn't reveal to the world that we had this material as we worked on the editorial decisions. Everything from, 'Should we run this?' to 'Should we release everything?' The authorities applauded our handling of the matter" – at least until disagreement over how much video should be used.
What Capus said next is even more revealing.
"Some of our competitors were screaming at us that we had an obligation to 'release everything.' Some of the same competitors, by the way, who have raised questions now about our handling of it, which I find interesting. It's just shameful for someone to say we're going to have blood on our hands. That's diversionary talk from someone who wants to put the focus on the media instead of on very difficult issues to deal with, like mental illness. Gun control has to be part of this."
The media can't have it both ways, however, when they quit covering stories to become the story and marry newsgathering to show business, like the new VH-1 show, "The Springer Hustle," which revels in how contrived "reality" television is.
Perhaps newsmagazines benefited from some reflection or took into account the backlash from in front of TV sets, but they banished these images from their covers.
Time, for example, ran victim mugshots.
Newsweek, "The Mind of a Killer," but not his head.
The Economist, from Britain, a red-white-and-blue handgun.
M4, in hindsight, is a classic mass murderer – friendless, bullied, blames others, bent on revenge and sending up warning signs with strange behavior long before his final meltdown.
The 23-year-old South Korean immigrant had been accused of stalking two women and of photographing female students in class with his cell phone.
His violent writings were so disturbing that M4 was removed from one class. Professors begged him to get counseling. He came to the United States at 8 and was teased and picked on because of his strange, "mumbly" way of speaking. "Go back to China" he heard at Westfield High School.
Where was everybody while he was parading around in a khaki-colored military-style vest, fingerless gloves, a backpack and a backward black baseball cap, swinging hammers and angrily putting a gun to his temple?