The Daily Novel

NBC has received some flak for publishing the video made by Chou Seung-Hui in interval between his first two murders and while planning the orgy of killing which followed. There is clearly a danger that it might encourage copy-cat murders by some other disgruntled American college kids. There does appear to be evidence that Chou was inspired, if that is the right word, by the Columbine spree killer.

My own view is that NBC was 100 per cent right to go ahead. Cynics will say that they just did it to raise their ratings. Like the reader who commented on my blog yesterday on Duncan Campbell’s exposure of Operation Ore. That reader told me that one of Campbell’s informers has since been arrested which indicates that his information may have been wrong. Thanks for that information. But the reader then adds this comment.

Still a story like that does help to sell a few more newspapers.

Which attacks the story by impugning the motives of the story teller. Now Duncan Campbell has to pay the rent like all of us, so obviously he writes partly for monetary reward. But it is pretty clear to those who know him, and those who read his work, that he is driven by all sorts of passions and beliefs in what he does. And that monetary gain ranks pretty low on his list of priorities.

Similarly the wall to wall coverage the Virginia tech killings have received is an entirely appropriate response. Most people do want to know the details of mass killings, in the hope that there may be lessons, which will help the police, teachers and the medical profession, to identify potential killers. And most people want to try and understand what drives a human being to extreme violence. We want to understand why devout Christians and Muslims kill on behalf of faiths based on love and non-violence. And with those killers who are driven by their own personal grudges we want to find out whether they were mad or bad.

Journalistic organisations should not just pass on such material to the police and let them decide what to do with it. Particularly in this case, where there is certainly room for doubt about whether the police response was fast enough to deal with the situation.

Andrew Marr came to the same conclusion in an article in the Daily Telegraph.

One of the endless problems of journalism is the awful, big event which is basically resistant to analysis, as in the Virginia university massacre. Rightly, any newspaper or TV organisation thinks it should show respect, and “proper news values”, by describing the killings and the killer at some length. But it’s also one of those stories which, frankly, tells us absolutely nothing about the human condition we did not already know, and has nothing to say about life here in Britain.

Some of Marr’s reasoning in this paragraph is distinctly woolly. Far from being ‘resistant to analysis’ such events benefit from analysis. There was an excellent article in The Independent by a criminologist, explaining that most spree killers are loners and contrasting them with serial killers.

There is another good bit of analysis by an American psychologist, Dr Lillian Glass, on her web site. She uses the evidence in the video, Chou’s attempts at fiction and the reports of his behaviour by his class mates in an attempt to understand why he did what he did.

Former classmates of the grade school he attended reported that he was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked. In fact some of his former classmates when he attended middle school recalled Chou getting picked on whereby children would push him down and laugh at him.
One former middle school classmate was quoted as saying “He didn’t speak English really well and they would really make fun of him.” –Other classmates recalled how Cho was pushed around and laughed at because of his shyness and the mumbly way he talked, and his awkward attempts to strike up a conversation.

Glass builds up a convincing case that Chou was a victim of bullying. This is a much less comforting analysis than saying he was mad or bad. It reminded me of how resistant I was to the picture of children painted by William Golding in his Lord of the Flies when I read it about fifty years ago. I did not want to believe that children left to their own devices could behave so nastily.

But of course they do. Glass may not be right. But if she is Andrew Marr is wrong. This incident in far off Virginia has something to say about life in Britain, where teachers are worried about an increase in bullying behaviour amongst schoolchildren. And those of us who remember Dunblane cannot believe that what happened at Virginia could only happen in America.