About the Pictures

Enough already with the pictures.

This sicko is getting what he wanted. Let's stop giving it to him, and giving the other sick people out there a reason to want to follow in his footsteps.

NBC had to show them. It's news. Understood. We all wanted to see them. And we did.

But once is enough. The question is not whether there is a First Amendment right to provide information, no matter how much pain it causes or perversion it feeds. The question is how you exercise that right. What kind of judgment do you use?

Of course we need to understand what happened and why. But this is not the real killer we are seeing on tape and in pictures. His classmates, roommates and teachers paint that picture, and it isn't an enviable one, a picture of a meek, withdrawn and depressed loner, someone many of his peers may be able to identify with, but few would choose to emulate. That is not the young man you see in the pictures and videotape, however. The warrior — armed, dangerous, angry, put upon, the victim and the avenger — is a delusion made real. The pictures and the package were his creation, his invention, his sick fantasy, his RPG (role playing game) first-person shooter brought to life. That doesn't tell us who the real person was, or why he acted, but only that he was sicker than anyone knew, which is what everyone knows already.

The police have reportedly been disappointed so far with their examination of the package. It doesn't provide important clues. It doesn't explain why he chose the victims he did. It just provides a killer with even more attention, and in the minds of his kind, a very sick type of glory that the media need not provide.

In explaining its decision to make public the pictures, video and rant of the non-victim victim, NBC said: "Upon receiving the materials from Cho Seung-Hui, NBC News took careful consideration in determining how the information should be distributed.

We did not rush the material onto air, but instead consulted with local authorities, who have since publicly acknowledged our appropriate handling of the matter … We believe it provides some answers to the critical question, 'why did this man carry out these awful murders?' The decision to run this video was reached by virtually every news organization in the world, as evidenced by coverage on television, on websites and in newspapers."

It was. But getting the video run may be one of the reasons this killer and others like him do what they do. Why reward them with repeat showings? Blanket coverage of a killer's fantasy is not news.

As of this morning, NBC announced that it would limit the use of the video to no more than 10 percent of its airtime. Fox News, where I work, went one step further, in a memo from FNC's John Moody on Thursday morning, which concluded that 18 hours after the images were first broadcast, "our news viewers have had the opportunity to see the images and draw their own conclusions about them. We see no reason to continue assaulting the public with these disturbing and demented images."

The images of Virginia Tech, including those of the killer, will remain with us for a long time. Virginia Tech will be known in the way Kent State is known, unfairly besmirched forever. The students who survived will be changed forever by what they lived through. Students and teachers everywhere are looking at one another with new wariness. It's bad. We all see that. But understanding all that, I'd rather remember the images of a community coming together than of a man coming apart. Given the choice of what to show us, the right decision seems clear.

To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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