Manitoba Press Council

News executives across North America are divided over the decision by NBC News to air clips it received from 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui, who shot 32 people to death before committing suicide on the Virginia Tech campus this week.

The airing of the video, strictly speaking, isn’t a print media issue with which the press council deals, but it is a pointed example of the sorts of ethical challenges that confront print and broadcast news executives daily. As the print media rapidly expand their online operations, they, too, have the ability to make these sorts of videos available to the public, and face the same ethical challenges as television stations.

CTV News and Global TV aired the video Wednesday night. CBC decided against airing it.

Robert Hurst, president of CTV News told the Canadian Press this week: “At CTV News, we believed that censorship is a last resort. It’s not our job to make a judgment whether it …might be bad or it might be good. Our job is to present Canadians with newsworthy materials.”

Tony Burman, editor in chief of CBC News, told Canadian Press the CBC decided not to air the video and avoid any coverage that could be interpreted as glorifying the act. “As I watched them last night…I imagined what kind of impact this broadcast would have on similarly deranged people,” Burman wrote in a letter posted on the network’s website. “I had this awful and sad feeling that there were parents watching these excerpts on NBC who were unaware they will lose their children in some future copycat killing triggered by these broadcasts.”

Troy Reeb, vice-president of news operations at Global TV, which also posted the video online, told CP: “Looking at the reality…millions of young people are no doubt going to be seeing this monstrous message either online or on television.” The network decided “it’s important that because the message is going to be out there that we need to contextualize and hae coverage that leads viewers tohope and not horror,” Troy said.

CBC’s Burman told CP he saw the issue differently. “There’s a responsibility for us not only as professional journalists, but as parents and adults to create a society that protects our young people.”