NBC has gotten some bad press for running the videos of Virginia Tech Mass Murderer Cho Seung-Hui. Mickey Kaus sums up the argument pretty succinctly:

Isn't Michael Ledeen right--NBC shouldn't have shown that video. It seems less like an "ethical challenge" than a no-brainer. Why encourage other potential Cho's to try for a similar publicity bonanza? This isn't a Unabomber like case where publicizing a killer's electronic media kit might help identify him.

I don't think I agree that the situation is that black-and-white. I'm not sure I agree with NBC, but I don't think their position is indefensible.

First, ideally speaking it's NBC News's job to show the news. By any objective measure that video was news. It's not a case of the news being caught on video but rather of the video itself being news. Before we saw the video everyone wanted to know "Why?!" and that video is, at least in part, a piece to that puzzle. Should news be suppressed simply because it benefits the wrong people? Sometimes they should, but refusing to show the news should never be the "no-brainer" decision.

The problem is that, as Kaus points out, it arguably encourages "potential Cho's". This is definitely problematic. I'm not sure, however, that I completely buy into it. It assumes that Cho and people like him are rational actors. I think it's more likely to make the next basketcase produce a video in addition to people, but I don't think it's going to be any more or any less an enticement of someone to actually commit the murders than the media's coverage absent the tapes. The same arguments made to suppress the video can be made to refrain from identifying the killer or covering the news story at all.

After Columbine many believed that was going to be just the beginning. It was the first time that the general public really got to know the killers and the killers became celebrities. It was the first one big enough for it to "stick". But instead of being the start of another round of school shootings, it was the high point (or low point, depending on how you look at it). The fact that Klebold and Harris became celebrities counterintuitively seemed to have no bearing on the actions of similarly disaffected young men or whatever bearing it had was overcompensated for by school administrations' measures enacted in response to the tragedy.

It's possible that time will make a clear fool of me on this and there will be more killers and more videos. But I think it's ludicrous to say, as Ron Coleman does, that "The blood of the victims of the 'next one' is on the hands of everyone in the decision-making chain at NBC for this utterly inexcusable decision". If it does happen again I don't think it'll be at all clear that the video is to blame.

I do have some problems with the videos. I believe that in addition to releasing clips they ought to have posted the whole thing online and basically put it in the "public domain" so to speak. The days when news organizations got to decide precisely what bits and pieces of the news we got are (or should be) over. Secondly, I'm not entirely comfortable with the fact that they showed the video before the situation was resolved. I don't buy into the "we were trying to assuage the killer" defense. Whatever merits they had, it's difficult to refrain from questioning their motives as it the whole thing came across as sensationalism at its worse and an attempt not only to report the news, but capitalize on their monopoly over a portion of it.

I don't know what I would have advocated if I'd been in the newsroom. I would be deeply uncomfortable running that video but it also wouldn't feel right to suppress it considering its newsworthiness. And whatever skepticism I had I wasn't there and whether they did it for the best reasons or the worst I'm not as sure as other people seem to be that it was the wrong thing to do.

Update: I'm actually more amenable to this argument:

The important thing is the victims; and yet, it is the madman's name we all know. Newspapers don't print the names of rape victims, by general agreement, so why not perform the same service in the case of shooting sprees?

Video or no video, Cho got what he wanted in the sense of publicity. Even without a video we'd seemingly know every last detail of the guy. The video is, in my mind, the icing on the cake. Refusing to even name the shooter would be a much bigger abandonment of journalistic reporting (which I should point out that I do not believe 'abandonment of journalistic reporting' to be a bad thing some of the time, regarding ongoing military operations and police investigations to name a couple), but it could at least be effective. Refusing to air the video strikes me as a half-measure.