The car of suspected gunman Vester L Flanagan, also known as Bryce Williams, off Highway I-66 in Virginia, hours after the shooting of two journalists. If, the thinking went, these shooters were motivated, in part, by the desire to see their faces and their words on the front pages of newspapers and in the lead stories on the evening news, perhaps news organizations would do better to ignore them and focus on the victims. One is the attention paid to the perpetrator.ĭuring the spate of school shootings in the late 1990s, there was much discussion of whether news coverage of each incident spawned copycats. The question of how we are harmed by viewing real as opposed to staged violence is the main ethics issue raised by coverage of the shootings in Virginia, but there are others. Unlike the mainstream news organizations, social media managers decided that the answer was no: While the broadcast and cable giants showed the interview footage shot by Adam Ward for WDBJ, Facebook and Twitter took down the images recorded by shooter Vester Lee Flanagan on his cell phone. Which raises the fundamental question about such video: Does anybody need to see it?
“We are choosing not to run the video of that right now,” station manager Jeff Marks said, “because frankly, we don’t need to see it again, and our staff doesn’t need to see it again.” Not surprisingly, WDBJ-TV, the station Parker and Shaw worked for, shied away. Later, though, the network posted a warning that the video “may be disturbing to some viewers,” then ran the entire clip.ĬBS News warned viewers orally that the footage would be disturbing, then showed it.ĪBC froze the video at the moment when Parker appeared to have been shot – perhaps the least palatable approach. “We’re not going to show you the entire sequence,” the anchor said. Three showed him pulling the trigger.Ī similar range of decisions was on display within the first few hours of the shooting of journalists Alison Parker and Adam Ward and local official Vicki Gardner in Moneta, Virginia.Īt first, NBC News froze the video before the shooting started. A couple showed him putting the gun in his mouth, but cut away before he pulled the trigger. Most only showed Dwyer brandishing the gun. Most Pennsylvania TV stations got the footage around a half-hour later. He called a news conference in Harrisburg and after reading a statement, with cameras rolling, he put a gun in his mouth and fired. It was the day before Dwyer’s sentencing on fraud charges.
0 kommentar(er)
