However depressingly common gun violence has become in the United States, high-profile cases continue to shock us. And this week, the news that a Virginia television crew had been murdered during a live broadcast only became more horrifying after the suspect, Vester Lee Flanagan II, posted what appeared to be his own video of the killings before committing suicide.
But however sickening Flanagan's broadcast was, he was hardly the first person to take advantage of technological advancements to self-publish material related to a murder. And self-publishing is a natural if unpleasant evolution in the long relationship between killers and the media. Flanagan's postings were probably inevitable, as may be a new kind of horror: a killing that's not just broadcast, but live-streamed.
The relationship between murderers and media outlets flows both ways; reporters have long recognized the news value in reaching out to a killer, sometimes even when a crime is in progress. When Howard Unruh embarked on the 1949 massacre of his neighbors that would become known as the Walk of Death, Camden Evening Courier writer Philip W. Buxton reached Unruh on the phone after he barricaded himself in his mother's apartment--the number was in the phone book. Buxton got out two questions before police started moving in on the apartment.
And killers sometimes reach out to the media either before or during their acts. During his 2006 mass shooting at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, Naveed Afzal Haq both talked about wanting to speak with reporters from CNN and asked an emergency dispatcher to patch him through to the network, a request she said she couldn't grant.
Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, mailed a statement, photos and a series of videos to NBC News; the package arrived after Cho began his attack. Two years later, Jiverly Antares Wong mailed a similar package to a Syracuse, New York, television station the day he carried out a shooting at the Binghamton American Civic Association; he had taken English classes at the association, and shot the organization's receptionists before opening fire in an English-as-a-second-language class.
Killers who reach out to reporters or send material to media outlets are relying on other people and organizations to broadcast their words. Television stations and newspapers may decide not to publish the material murderers send them because they do not want to compromise law enforcement investigations, because they do not want to give killers platforms, or out of respect for survivors and the families of the dead. So it's no surprise that as social media has made all sorts of self-publishing easier than ever that killers have begun to distribute their own manifestos and videos of their actions themselves.
In One of Us, Asne Seierstad's book about Anders Behring Breivik's 2011 bombing of government buildings in Oslo and shootings of 69 people at the summer youth camp for the Norwegian Labor Party, she notes that a critical part of Breivik's plan was the distribution of a racist, largely plagiarized manifesto that railed against Muslim immigrants.
"Once the manifesto had been sent to a thousand email addresses, everything ground to a halt," Seierstad reports. "[Norwegian telecommunications company] Telenor's spam filter had detected that the upper limit for the number of messages that could be sent per day had been reached."
Social media has no spam filter and no editors to express qualms about publication.
Flanagan worked in media. The reporter and cameraman he killed were his colleagues. His crime exploited the live nature of the broadcast to make sure people would see his crime. Posting the video himself extended the reach of his terror beyond the local market for the broadcast and beyond anyone who was watching in the original time slot. Flanagan may have known more than other members of his deadly fraternity about how to make himself seen, but he's hardly alone in the desire to have his awful acts witnessed and acknowledged.
Flanagan won't be the last, either. As sickening as the broadcasts were--my startled deskmates and I jumped when one of our colleagues played Flanagan's video in the newsroom--I'm afraid that worse is yet to come.
Can it be long before a killer live-streams his terrible work? Technology, and an accelerating rate of mass killings, seems to make such an outcome inevitable.
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Alyssa Rosenberg writes the Post's Act Four blog.
Editorial on 08/28/2015