So writes Sun-Kyung Cho, sister of Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech murderer, and I feel her grief:
On behalf of our family, we are so deeply sorry for the devastation my brother has caused. No words can express our sadness that 32 innocent people lost their lives this week in such a terrible, senseless tragedy. We are heartbroken. …
We are humbled by this darkness. We feel hopeless, helpless and lost. This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn’t know this person. …
He made the world weep.
We pray for their families and loved ones who are experiencing so much excruciating grief. And we pray for those who were injured and for those whose lives are changed forever because of what they witnessed and experienced. [e.a.]
Those are the words of a woman with a heart—unlike the NBC brass, which decided to change even more lives for the worse in the name of the public’s right to know. NBC released the sick killer’s “media manifesto” into the global media’s bloodstream and then washed its hands of responsibility as it turned viral (it’s currently the 8th-most-viewed on viralvideochart and fought back when a backlash erupted almost immediately.
As I’ve written before, this blog is called Infotainment Rules not because I love infotainment but because I think it’s a big lie for NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and all the others to call their product “news” when it is nothing more than packaged, often sensationalistic, and always deliberately heightened storytelling with a strong emphasis on heroes, villains, and conflict—the goal of which is to elicit raw emotion from you so that you will keep your eyeballs on that channel and put down the remote, and then keep coming back for more tomorrow.
But you knew that. So it’s refreshing to read that one guy is still doing things the old-fashioned way—earning his audience:
[ABC's Charles] Gibson, who didn’t arrive on the scene until Tuesday and delegated many interviews to ABC colleagues, was better than either of his rivals at keeping an even keel. His interview with a group of survivors on Tuesday night was more bearable to watch, mostly because his questions, posed in a kindly but neutral manner, solicited information, not emotion.
“And how would you describe his facial manner and demeanor?” Mr. Gibson asked, referring to the gunman. “Could you feel him pushing against the door?” Perhaps relieved to be asked for facts and not just their feelings, the students delivered both. [e.a.]
Because it makes me sick that NBC hypocritically hides its greedy thirst for ratings behind the public’s “right to know” how it feels to be assaulted by the lunatic ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic, I hope the backlash goes on and on. I hope the network’s ratings plummet. I hope Charlie Gibson stomps all over the unbearably supercilious Brian Williams.
Not only was NBC’s catastrophically sensationalistic “reporting” of the killer’s “media manifesto” much worse than the horrible things the dreadful Imus said (as Mickey Kaus among others has mentioned). It’s on par with If I Did It, the O.J. book cooked up by Judith Regan, which was declared totally anathema by every talking head in the game and which got Judith Regan canned from the Empire of Lowbrow.
Here’s some of Howard Kurtz’s November 2006 Reliable Sources interview with Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter on that subject:
KURTZ: I want to ask you about the O.J. Simpson debacle. The public revulsion that forced Rupert Murdoch to cancel this odious TV and book deal, does that send a broader message to trash merchants that there is a line still, somewhere?
KURT ANDERSEN, “NEW YORK” MAGAZINE: I thank that’s it exactly. And I think it’s grand, it’s — you know, and we’ve had 20 years, especially in the news business, in the media business, where marketplace values have trumped all other values, and here we found the bottom. And I think that feels good for everybody.
KURTZ: Graydon Carter, did Murdoch simply underestimate the way that booksellers and advertisers and FOX affiliates and even FOX News commentators would revolt against this garbage?
The MSM will keep hitting bottom until the bottom falls out of the “news” merchants’ ratings.
