Inside the Media Echo Chamber

When I look back on the year that was, there is something I wish I hadn’t been party to. April 16 2007 was the day that Seung-Hui Cho, 23, killed 32 students and professors at Virginia Tech and then turned his gun on himself. I had just begun a freelance project for a news website. I was there to create original content, but first there was a period of training so that I could learn how to post my stories and visual packages online.

On that day, at about 5pm, I was asked to work late. At 7pm my editor called to tell me to expect a slide show of images. “As soon as you get them, post them live and then go back and write captions for each image,” he instructed. The images were stills taken from the video that Cho had sent to NBC before he opened fire at his college — a video that NBC had aired. On the website it was business as usual to report on this event and in “just following orders”, I became responsible for spreading those poisonous images across the Internet.

Certainly I was not alone. A writer on salon.com called news organisations like the one I was working at “the media echo chamber”, to describe how they “dutifully printed and broadcast everything straight from the mouths of high-profile violent offenders and felons alike, calling it ‘news’”. That night, when I went through image after image of an obviously disturbed and now already dead young man, scowling and pointing his gun into my face, I felt extremely uneasy, but I didn’t stop. I was doing my job.

I couldn’t sleep when I got home, not least of all because the assignment had left me with a mild dose of post-traumatic stress. Each time I closed my eyes I saw the black barrel of Cho’s gun and heard his gruff, strangled threats.

By the time I got to my desk the next day, pale and a little shaky, the news organisation had handed the mouthpiece over to its resident psychologist, who was quickly saving the day by saying how harmful it was for the national psyche (international, really, considering that it’s the “World Wide Web”) to have to stare at Cho’s violent diary of death. Of course, by this time the entire media echo chamber had cut down its coverage to just the tamest photograph of Cho, finally understanding that for a sociopath, anonymity is worse than death.

But the damage was done. As the essay on salon.com says, the media had collectively convinced “other disenfranchised citizens that the best way to get your voice heard is by doing something ‘newsworthy’ in the fine tradition of John Hinkley jnr, Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski, Mohammed Atta and other celebrated sociopaths, terrorists and misfits”.

A few hours later, when one of my senior editors asked me to go down to Korea Town (a neighbourhood in Manhattan that’s bordered by 31st and 36th Streets and Fifth and Sixth Avenues) and ask Koreans and Korean-Americans how they felt about being Korean in light of Cho’s disastrous deed, I finally found my voice and declined. I can’t say that taking this stand served me particularly well at work — I was viewed after that as a little prickly and criticised by more hardcore news types as “not a real journalist” — but I was glad I turned it down.

I have since moved on from the news organisation — I eventually lost my mojo entirely when, during the civil war in Gaza, our features meetings were all about Paris Hilton’s sojourn in jail — but the small role I played in spreading Cho’s hate-filled message has stuck with me.

Last week, in the Associated Press’s annual vote, the Virginia Tech killings were chosen as the top story of 2007 by US editors and news directors. The mortgage crisis, which unsettled the US housing market, was second; the war in Iraq, third.

Virginia Tech was the worst mass shooting in modern US history and news coverage has prompted colleges to reassess their emergency response systems, but voting it in at number one when the US is still in Iraq and more journalists have been killed trying to cover that war than ever before seems to smack of industry self-congratulation.

But after a year like this, I guess we should all be grateful that the triumvirate of tarts — Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears or Paris Hilton — didn’t make the top three.

This column first appeared in the Sunday Times, South Africa in the Made in Manhattan column