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technoratiI think the attitude that some of this is "appropriate" to share and some "is not" is condescending. It further extends the role of the traditional media as gatekeepers and arbiters of our right to know.
I also think the car accident analogy is off. You may not have a right to ask to see the bloody bodies, but you have a right to know if the guy that caused it was drunk - driving and arrest records are usually easily obtained.
Sensitivity to the victims' families is a noble pursuit, but, I would argue, outweighed by the public's need to see these things. If we witness, through his testimonial, the mind at work, we may prevent the next wacko from going off. If we recognize in someone else, the language of victimization and venom, we may step in before the bullets fly.
I respect the opinion that journalists are supposed to apply judgement to determine what should and should not be shared, but "appropriate" is a purely subjective concept and reporting is (supposedly) an objective process. How do you reconcile the two?
What's "appropriate" to me may be wholly inappropriate to someone else. Shouldn't you put it out there and let the individual decide? Some argued that the Hussein execution video would have been inappropriate to air. Yet the YouTube views would indicate an awful lot of people felt otherwise. To write that off as 'morbid curiosity' is to be judgemental about others beliefs and values.
To the larger point of "Do I want my son seeing this on the web?", I would try to make the case that you do.
I suspect that Cho's parents probably never saw the kid that appears in that video. They likely had no idea he existed. The psychiatric professionals examined Cho and found he wasn't a danger. However, there were clearly some classmates who were concerned about him enough to file complaints. The other kids he interacted with clearly saw something the "professionals" missed.
If your child saw the video (especially your pre-teen and teenage kids), they may be more likely to sound an alarm bell when their friends sound like Cho. I would argue it is probably more important that your kids see it than for you to.
It seems to me that there
It seems to me that there are two different prongs to this debate.
One involves a public policy claim: crowd-sourced research of these videos will better lead to prevention of future murders. I am a little skeptical of this claim. It may lead to some better understanding of the psychology of this young man, but I strongly doubt that it will lead to the kind of clues that themselves lead to mass-murder prevention.
The second is more complicated: that NBC doesn’t have the right to keep video that it chooses not to use—its a moral claim about the obligation of some category of organizations to share information. For what category of information, and to what category of people, does this obligation apply? If the videos had been sent to me, as a citizen, I’d feel no obligation to share them (unless I was convinced of the public policy argument)—any more than I’d feel an obligation to share a suicide note I happened to read, or a thousand pieces of political information that I might know but choose not to put in the public sphere. I think this intuition is widely, and rightly, shared—that a private citizen who comes upon information does not have a general responsibility to share it.
What about bloggers? What if the package was sent to a blogger? Josh Wolf was released this month after 225 days in jail, having refused to share video footage from a San Francisco protest that could have been incriminating. Most will say that is different because Wolf took the video himself, and therefore has special rights to protecting his recorded experience, but its still a relevant comparison. Most bloggers would strongly resist the idea that the fact of being a blogger, or a independent sharer of media, creates an obligation to share scoops, tips, video, or email sent to them. Does Josh Marshall have an obligation to share all emails sent to the tip line at TPM? Of course not. Would a collection of tips sent to TPM be more informative than Cho's videos? Probably. Might people rail at Josh Marshall if he didn’t release the video, had it been sent to him instead of NBC news? Probably. But my guess is that it would be because of our curiosity—we want to see it, we want to know, we want to understand—more than because we believed he had an obligation.
Since we cannot insist that NBC share it because Cho wanted it shared, then, is there something unique about a news organization that enhances its obligations to share, over that of a citizen or a blogger? Beyond the first argument—the public policy claim—I think not. It may be, however, that a general public policy claim does justify the moral claim—as a general rule, unsolicited, unused, not-untrue documents sent news organizations should be shared, because we would, in fact, know more about the world—more about political cconnections, more about science, more about corruption, more about natural resources, more about police methods, a little more about everything—if a version of the tip-line to NBC were shared.
Finally, some might argue that there is something unique about the fact that it is video, creating a different obligation to share it than if it were text. If they did make this argument, I wouldn’t understand it, though I’m open to hearing it.
My gut instinct is the exact opposite of Winers—I am glad that they are not automatically sharing it, and I hope they take their time. Its clear that the best way for NBC to make money off this is to share all the videos, all the text, all the materials. If they are held back, it seems to me quite likely to be for real reasons of concern, and I take for granted that there is role in society—a role for media companies but for all of us—for making judgments based on delicacy and concerns about feeding a fascination with the grotesque. There is no rush to reveal—even the strongest crowdsourcer would have to concede its unlikely anything will change in the next few months that depends upon the release of these videos--and I hope they make their decision carefully and unrushed and with the best interests of all of us in mind.