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You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/27/virgina-shooting-murders-media-response-real-time
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| Version 1 | Version 2 |
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| Virginia shootings: we learn nothing from seeing murder in real time | Virginia shootings: we learn nothing from seeing murder in real time |
| (about 2 hours later) | |
| I don’t know at what exact point the Virginia murders began. Was it when the killer switched his camera on? Was it when he first pointed the gun at TV journalist Alison Parker, who continued her live broadcast, apparently oblivious to his presence? Or was it when he pointed the gun again, and pulled the trigger on Parker and her colleague Adam Ward? | I don’t know at what exact point the Virginia murders began. Was it when the killer switched his camera on? Was it when he first pointed the gun at TV journalist Alison Parker, who continued her live broadcast, apparently oblivious to his presence? Or was it when he pointed the gun again, and pulled the trigger on Parker and her colleague Adam Ward? |
| Related: Were the media wrong to publish Virginia shootings video and images? | Related: Were the media wrong to publish Virginia shootings video and images? |
| For most people, these questions would become grotesquely irrelevant once the crime had been committed. In newsrooms yesterday they were considered in painstaking detail. CNN and the BBC broadcast some of the footage; while CNN changed its mind, the BBC, to my astonishment, showed Vester Flanagan’s footage of his gun aimed at his victim to lead the News at Ten. The Guardian and the New York Times didn’t host the gunman’s video, or use stills from it in print. The Mail splashed on an image of Parker from the broadcast footage (as opposed to the attacker’s) with the grisly caption: “Moment gunman with a grudge shot news girl on live TV”. The Times and the Mirror concluded that it was OK to show the gun if you didn’t show it firing, and put the stills on their front pages. | |
| And to the Sun and the New York Daily News, the answer was a hideous exercise in subdividing time. Both showed the muzzle flash; the trigger had been pulled, the logic goes, but the bullet is yet to reach its target. The Sun included a reminder to “watch the chilling video” on its website. The Daily News went a frame further, showing Taylor’s flinch in the millisecond after the shot was fired. In these accounts, the murder doesn’t begin until the moment the bullet hits. It’s fine: she’s not dead yet. | |
| The principles in operation here are so self-evident. Yes, next to deliberate dishonesty, squeamishness is maybe a journalist’s cardinal sin; but clarity doesn’t require you to publish everything, and sometimes you have a responsibility not to. It makes me weary to repeat this sanctimonious stuff. | The principles in operation here are so self-evident. Yes, next to deliberate dishonesty, squeamishness is maybe a journalist’s cardinal sin; but clarity doesn’t require you to publish everything, and sometimes you have a responsibility not to. It makes me weary to repeat this sanctimonious stuff. |
| There isn’t, in fact, anything new here: Isis’s PR strategy has given us ample opportunity to rehearse these questions. Should you be in any doubt, listen to Parker’s father: “It’s like showing those beheadings,” he said. “I am not going to watch it … all it would do is rip out my heart further than it already is.” Or, if you feel that his view is too complicated by personal circumstance, consider this sensible diktat after Isis beheaded a British aid worker: “We are not publishing images from the video … we refuse to give his absurd murderers the publicity they crave.” Last October, that was the policy of the Sun. | |
| Related: The blasé acceptance that you might get shot is a fact of American life | Megan Carpentier | Related: The blasé acceptance that you might get shot is a fact of American life | Megan Carpentier |
| It’s true that the two situations are different. One uses murder as a recruiting sergeant; the other is a simpler act of egoistic nihilism. But in the answers to the most vital questions, they are exactly the same. In each case, to see the video adds nothing substantial to our understanding; it simply tosses another rock into the well of our collective sorrow. And in each case it adheres closely to the perpetrators’ ideal (and imitable) script. | It’s true that the two situations are different. One uses murder as a recruiting sergeant; the other is a simpler act of egoistic nihilism. But in the answers to the most vital questions, they are exactly the same. In each case, to see the video adds nothing substantial to our understanding; it simply tosses another rock into the well of our collective sorrow. And in each case it adheres closely to the perpetrators’ ideal (and imitable) script. |
| In missing these obvious facts and instead asking ourselves pompous questions about murder in the age of social media, we miss the fundamental point of the word “social”: meaning is not simply transmitted; it is also received. In the end, these crimes mean what we allow them to mean. We should choose to let the victims’ lives mean something, instead. | In missing these obvious facts and instead asking ourselves pompous questions about murder in the age of social media, we miss the fundamental point of the word “social”: meaning is not simply transmitted; it is also received. In the end, these crimes mean what we allow them to mean. We should choose to let the victims’ lives mean something, instead. |