Townhall.com | Nicole Gelinas | April 25, 2007
Why did NBC News—as well as its competitors and print-media counterparts—show that video? Through the spectacular posthumous attention that the media have awarded him, Cho Seung-Hui has shown just how easy it is for an intelligent killer to manipulate sophisticated news organizations into serving as barely filtered propaganda pipelines.
Mass killers don’t operate in a vacuum, and Cho learned well from Columbine mass murderers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. The Columbine killers made their own propaganda to accompany their attack, but they didn’t think to send it directly to the media before they killed 12 high school classmates and a teacher. Investigators kept most of the material that the two teens had created away from the public for years, until interest had waned (their major work, a video that they spent a year making, remains under government seal to this day). Klebold and Harris got famous, but they never planned well enough to use their mayhem as a platform to speak directly to the public.
Cho, who doubtless watched television coverage of the Columbine attack as a high school student himself eight years ago, clearly wanted to surpass Klebold and Harris and avoid their mistakes, so he cut out the law-enforcement middleman. NBC ran footage from the homemade DVD that he sent it and published the lurid self-portraits of him posing with his weapons—before the 32 families that he tore apart could even bury their loved ones. One wonders if it was merely by chance that Cho committed his murders bright and early Monday morning, the beginning of the week’s news cycle.
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