News media held hostage - Bound and gagged by news itself
Sean Scallon
May 01, 2007
By Sean Scallon
It’s fashionable to call the murderer of Virginia Tech, Seung-Hui Cho, deranged or crazy or a lunatic. But people who are diagnosed as crazy generally are called as such because they do things that don’t make sense and could be classified as quite stupid. Cho certainly knew what he was doing mailing his manifesto, video tapes and pictures of himself to NBC before killing even more of his innocent classmates. He could have mailed all that to his parents if he wanted to. Instead, it was NBC that fit his evil plan.
For Cho knew well that NBC, part of a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, would go over those tapes, analyses them, study them, and replay them over and over again within the news cycle of the Virginia Tech massacre. He knew full well he would have the attention he couldn’t get in life (largely because he was too scared to seek it) all over him in death for years to come.
Others quickly saw this too, which is why there was a backlash against NBC for allowing Cho to get his 15 minutes of fame from the grave. But the damage was done. The images are already broadcast and the tapes widely disseminated. You can argue from a journalistic standpoint NBC had a responsibility to release such information, but not to get ratings from the morbid. The internet allows one to set up a website for that sort of thing. The gawkers should go there.
But Cho knew his target audience and he knew the power he would have long since he left the earth. Not only did he put the gun to his classmates, but also to the news media itself. He became its latest hostage taker.
From Anna Nicole Smith to Don Imus to Seung-Hui Cho, the news media of our day and age suffers from a Stockholm Syndrome so severe that it almost demands that somebody whisk them off into a van and bound and gag them if only for a short while. The news media of this country does not lead anymore. It does not exercise “news judgment” or act as “gatekeepers” as to what is news and what is not news like it did even 25 years ago. It lets events seize it in broad daylight and run with them. How else do you explain the media’s frenzy-like coverage of the trivial like who is the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s child or the controversy over Don Imus’ remarks? It lurches from story to story for as long as the attention spans gives out then lurches someplace else, like the kidnapper who moves his victim around as to avoid the police. For a nation that supposedly at war, it is truly a strange phenomenon to see such a conflict relegated to the back pages and the backstories of our popular press in favor of the love child of a bimbo.
Only in this case, the victim wants to remain a hostage. Hostage crises are good news stories right? After all in the 24/7 news cycle, something has to fill the void, something has grab viewers attention. Nobody wants boredom, or say that on most days not much is going on that’s really worthy of your attention. Nonsense! There’s always something, even if it’s putting a tail on Lindsay Lohan to catch her in getting in trouble again as reflection of the spoiled values of the Hollywood celebrity aristocracy. Now that’s newsworthy!
Once upon a time serious news people complained that 22 minutes of news wasn’t enough to fully inform views of what was going on the world. Now we’ve got 24 hours to inform people what’s going on in the world and that’s still not enough time, especially when so much that is not news crowds out the stuff that is. The 24-hour cable news channels started the Stockholm Syndrome of the news media in its thirst for content which was quickly followed by the internet, the bloggers and celebrity culture, the U.S.’ new aristocracy. They’re fully in control now. All the networks honchos do is look around to see what’s hot, what generates “buzz” and then swarm it with non-stop intensity the ways flies swarm on crap. We’re all the mercy of people who wish to use us for their agendas, whether it’s a celebrity, a politician, the White House, the Pentagon, a blogger, pundit or someone like Seung-Hui Cho. Instead of fighting back, the media goes along with and begins to like the hostage taker while he or she gets their money in the end, knowing there are people willing to pay. In this case, it’s the advertisers and corporations who control the news divisions. If everything has been reduced to just money and ratings (not that hasn’t been true before but news judgment did play some role), then we have a symbiotic relationship don’t we? The hostages depend upon the hostage takers for their very survival!
So were we all better off when just a few toffee-nosed journalists got to decide what was news and what wasn’t from New York Times and the Washington Post and the AP on down to the three national television networks and on down to the rest of us? There’s a lot to be said for the democratization of news. After all without it, this column you’re reading would be nothing more than a column in a local newspaper in an earlier day and age. But a democracy can wind up producing its own kind of tyranny, a tyranny of the majority, just as in revolutionary France. And if democracy and the free marketplace is what we have when it comes to information nowadays, why is there so much crap to choose from that it drowns out everything on the shelves? Because without such elites to weed out the crap, or even weakened elites or elites who now have no confidence in themselves anymore and who wish to debase themselves by sputtering a phony populism, there is anarchy. But anarchy doesn’t last for long because nature abhors a vacuum, a vacuum nicely filled by the Seung-Hui Chos of the world who wish to spring their selfish and evil desires for fame, fortune, infamy, revenge, notoriety you name it on the normal, the decent and the ordinary and do so by taking hostage those that grant such desires to millions around the world through a transmitter or wireless network.
If being held hostage is tyranny localized, then the news media in the U.S. certainly do love it so, whether the rest of do or not.
Sean Scallon is a freelance writer and journalist living in Arkansaw, Wisconsin
It’s fashionable to call the murderer of Virginia Tech, Seung-Hui Cho, deranged or crazy or a lunatic. But people who are diagnosed as crazy generally are called as such because they do things that don’t make sense and could be classified as quite stupid. Cho certainly knew what he was doing mailing his manifesto, video tapes and pictures of himself to NBC before killing even more of his innocent classmates. He could have mailed all that to his parents if he wanted to. Instead, it was NBC that fit his evil plan.
For Cho knew well that NBC, part of a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, would go over those tapes, analyses them, study them, and replay them over and over again within the news cycle of the Virginia Tech massacre. He knew full well he would have the attention he couldn’t get in life (largely because he was too scared to seek it) all over him in death for years to come.
Others quickly saw this too, which is why there was a backlash against NBC for allowing Cho to get his 15 minutes of fame from the grave. But the damage was done. The images are already broadcast and the tapes widely disseminated. You can argue from a journalistic standpoint NBC had a responsibility to release such information, but not to get ratings from the morbid. The internet allows one to set up a website for that sort of thing. The gawkers should go there.
But Cho knew his target audience and he knew the power he would have long since he left the earth. Not only did he put the gun to his classmates, but also to the news media itself. He became its latest hostage taker.
From Anna Nicole Smith to Don Imus to Seung-Hui Cho, the news media of our day and age suffers from a Stockholm Syndrome so severe that it almost demands that somebody whisk them off into a van and bound and gag them if only for a short while. The news media of this country does not lead anymore. It does not exercise “news judgment” or act as “gatekeepers” as to what is news and what is not news like it did even 25 years ago. It lets events seize it in broad daylight and run with them. How else do you explain the media’s frenzy-like coverage of the trivial like who is the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s child or the controversy over Don Imus’ remarks? It lurches from story to story for as long as the attention spans gives out then lurches someplace else, like the kidnapper who moves his victim around as to avoid the police. For a nation that supposedly at war, it is truly a strange phenomenon to see such a conflict relegated to the back pages and the backstories of our popular press in favor of the love child of a bimbo.
Only in this case, the victim wants to remain a hostage. Hostage crises are good news stories right? After all in the 24/7 news cycle, something has to fill the void, something has grab viewers attention. Nobody wants boredom, or say that on most days not much is going on that’s really worthy of your attention. Nonsense! There’s always something, even if it’s putting a tail on Lindsay Lohan to catch her in getting in trouble again as reflection of the spoiled values of the Hollywood celebrity aristocracy. Now that’s newsworthy!
Once upon a time serious news people complained that 22 minutes of news wasn’t enough to fully inform views of what was going on the world. Now we’ve got 24 hours to inform people what’s going on in the world and that’s still not enough time, especially when so much that is not news crowds out the stuff that is. The 24-hour cable news channels started the Stockholm Syndrome of the news media in its thirst for content which was quickly followed by the internet, the bloggers and celebrity culture, the U.S.’ new aristocracy. They’re fully in control now. All the networks honchos do is look around to see what’s hot, what generates “buzz” and then swarm it with non-stop intensity the ways flies swarm on crap. We’re all the mercy of people who wish to use us for their agendas, whether it’s a celebrity, a politician, the White House, the Pentagon, a blogger, pundit or someone like Seung-Hui Cho. Instead of fighting back, the media goes along with and begins to like the hostage taker while he or she gets their money in the end, knowing there are people willing to pay. In this case, it’s the advertisers and corporations who control the news divisions. If everything has been reduced to just money and ratings (not that hasn’t been true before but news judgment did play some role), then we have a symbiotic relationship don’t we? The hostages depend upon the hostage takers for their very survival!
So were we all better off when just a few toffee-nosed journalists got to decide what was news and what wasn’t from New York Times and the Washington Post and the AP on down to the three national television networks and on down to the rest of us? There’s a lot to be said for the democratization of news. After all without it, this column you’re reading would be nothing more than a column in a local newspaper in an earlier day and age. But a democracy can wind up producing its own kind of tyranny, a tyranny of the majority, just as in revolutionary France. And if democracy and the free marketplace is what we have when it comes to information nowadays, why is there so much crap to choose from that it drowns out everything on the shelves? Because without such elites to weed out the crap, or even weakened elites or elites who now have no confidence in themselves anymore and who wish to debase themselves by sputtering a phony populism, there is anarchy. But anarchy doesn’t last for long because nature abhors a vacuum, a vacuum nicely filled by the Seung-Hui Chos of the world who wish to spring their selfish and evil desires for fame, fortune, infamy, revenge, notoriety you name it on the normal, the decent and the ordinary and do so by taking hostage those that grant such desires to millions around the world through a transmitter or wireless network.
If being held hostage is tyranny localized, then the news media in the U.S. certainly do love it so, whether the rest of do or not.
Sean Scallon is a freelance writer and journalist living in Arkansaw, Wisconsin
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