Thursday, April 19, 2007

"Showing the video is a social catastrophe."

"If anybody cares about the victims in Blacksburg and if anybody cares about their children, stop showing this video now. Take it off the Internet. Let it be relegated to YouTube. Showing the video is a social catastrophe . . . I promise you the disaffected will watch him the way they watched 'Natural Born Killers.' I know. I examine these people. I've examined mass shooters who have told me they've watched it 20 times. You cannot saturate the American public with this kind of message.

"I think that's very important for the viewing audience to understand. This is not him. These videos do not help us understand him. They distort him. He was meek. He was quiet. This is a PR tape of him trying to turn himself into a Quentin Tarantino character," Welner said. "This is precisely why this should not be released. Parents, you should cut the pictures out of the newspaper. Do not let your children see it. Take them out of the room when these videos are shown. Because he's paranoid and his agenda of blaming the rest of the world is unedited."

"There's nothing to learn from this except giving it validation. If this rambling showed up in an emergency room, my colleagues and I would listen carefully and, when we reflected that it was delusional, would go see the next patient and start the medication," he said. "This makes it sound like he was tormented. He wasn't."

--Forensic psychiatrist and ABC News consultant Michael Welner, discussing the consequences of the media airing the Seung-hui Cho video.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Now comes word that families of some victims at Virginia Tech have cancelled NBC appearances over the airing of the videos, etc.

This seems to be one of those increasingly common instances in which the media abdicates any sense of responsibility for what it dispenses and the consequences of spreading it around. The inability to look away from carnage or any other horror has become pathological with the media.

Thursday, April 19, 2007 12:46:00 PM  

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