Friday, April 20, 2007

Another rant about the media

Well halfway across the world and however many days after the Virginia shooting I still can't turn on the TV news without seeing big reports about the shooter, his photos, his plays, his life. BBC World even was so low as to discuss the complaints by the police of NBC showing the videos/pictures, while showing the pictures and videos in a splitscreen. Al-Jazeera English, which claims to show a "different perspective", has been giving this as much focus as the other networks it pretends to be different from.

And yet at no point in time has BBC or Al-Jazeera provided that kind of coverage about the victims. Not their names, their dreams, their goals in life, nothing. Hey BBC, maybe some of the victims wrote plays too! Ever consider reading them to viewers?!

Oh, and thanks for the 15-second update on how 100,000 people died in Darfur. Feel free to go back to Virginia now to talk to your expert-of-the-day psychiatrist for 5 minutes about what the shooter had for lunch that day.

The shooter is dead and yet he won. He wanted fame and knew how to get it. Sent pictures to a network who happily gave him what he wanted. He not only killed dozens of innocent people, he used their deaths, and the grief and pain of their families, to propel himself into a sick form of immortality. Just like he wanted. And the media gave it to him - a parting gift from people who apparantly will walk over 30+ graves for ratings.

I hate the media sometimes. I just hate them.

2 comments:

Magnus said...

I think Cho was partially after fame, but mostly I believe he was amentally person who completely fell through the cracks. Had some experiences withthe mentally and guys like Cho of late.

Glen McKay said...

Can't argue with him being amentally but he did take the time to gather everything into a package, look up the address for NBC, then send it to them, for a reason.