The Virginia Tech Shootings and a Journalist's Identity

Hello,

What I'm going to talk about today is not exactly timely at this point, but then again I only have a blog now. It's something that I wanted to get off my chest before, and now that I am in the blogsphere, I will do so.

As you know, on April 16 at Virginia Tech, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and himself. I don't think I need to mention that this was an atrocity. I'm nowhere near good enough a writer to adequately describe this type of emotion.

Having said that, as a writer and in the ballpark of what one might consider a journalist, I took a special interest in the controversy of NBC and Cho's videos. As you know, Cho sent NBC a sort of manifesto, and NBC aired some of the package on April 18. As a Virginia Tech student, I can tell you that this was met with much anger on campus. People thought that NBC was insensitive in airing these videos. They thought they were giving Cho what he wanted.

Well at this point, it is not my goal to simply decide whether or not publishing these videos was correct. Rather, I want to ask a question that I feel deserves more consideration: why did NBC publish this? The broad question is what really motivates a journalist in publishing?

Sure journalists will go on and on about the importance of informing the public. And I certainly agree that an informed public is perhaps the most important thing in democracy, and a journalist has an obligation to meet that end. The best pure reporters (there is a difference between writer and reporter) are those who don't accept that status quo and investigate to unearth problems that need to be addressed and taken to heart in our society. Absolutely this is true.

But at its core, it's an issue of the journalist's identity. Not publishing just doesn't compute with it.

Imagine you're a journalist, and you go home to your significant other, who asks you, "How was your day?" When you talk about your work, you're supposed to talk about it with pride, take pride in it. You're supposed to accomplish things that you're proud to go home and talk to your significant other about. So if the journalist goes home, and tells his significant other, "I chose NOT to publish something," how much pride do you think would go with that?

The fact is that we are a society that emphasizes pride in individual identity. Furthermore, that identity is often found in what you do for a living. How many times have we heard conversations between strangers start off with the question, "What do you do?"

And for a journalist, not publishing something goes against their identity. It goes against what they're all about.

I know this because I have gone through a bit of journalistic education, and throughout it all, we are endlessly taught the importance of publishing. I almost never had any time of lesson of when it might be the right thing not to publish, for reasons such as privacy or sensitivity. Journalists are bred to think that withholding material is a sin.

It was fascinating to read a bit of the coverage on South Korea after the shootings and how many people in the country took it personally. There is more of a sense of group identity and less of a sense of individual identity. When people think about group identity, they often think about people blindly following the leaders or blindly following a group's tradition. My favorite short story of all time, The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, swims brilliantly through this latter topic.

But doesn't individual identity cause us sometimes to do the same thing? Identity as a tough guy getting in the way of solving a confrontation peacefully. Identity as a cutthroat businessperson laying off bunches of people in order to make the company more profitable. Identity as a suave lawyer going for the win in spite of what really happened. Individual identity can be dangerous.

Not to say that it was necessarily wrong to publish some of Cho's videos. I have mixed feelings about that. Sensitivity aside, I think we need to know as much about this person as possible in order to try and solve this puzzle of why this kind of thing happens in this country much more than any other first world countries.

But there was reason to publish the videos other than what was good for the public. It was so those who published it could look at themselves and feel that they have lived up to the standards that their individual identity has laid out for them.