In one sad sense there was nothing new, or even very unusual, about the televised killing of two journalists in Virginia on Wednesday morning.
Death on TV has occurred with frightening regularity ever since the advent of the medium: Jack Ruby’s shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy, in 1963; and the Sept. 11, 2001, fall of the World Trade Center. The prospect of death appearing suddenly on our screens is as common as it is ghoulish.
Yet in another way, the video of the Virginia shootings posted by Bryce Williams, whose real name is Vester Lee Flanagan and who is thought to be the gunman who killed two of his former co-workers at the television station WDBJ, is a frightful twist in an age of online sharing and ubiquitous video documentation.
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The killings appear to have been skilfully engineered for maximum distribution, and to sow maximum dread, over Twitter, Facebook and mobile phones. The video Flanagan shows is an up-close, first-person execution. It was posted only after his social media accounts had become widely known, while the police were in pursuit of the killer. And unlike previous televised deaths, these were not merely broadcast, but widely and virally distributed, playing out with the complicity of thousands, perhaps millions, of social networking users who could not help but watching and sharing. The horror was the dawning realisation, as the video spread across the networks, that the killer had anticipated the moves; that he had been counting on the mechanics of these services and on our inability to resist passing on what he had posted.
For many, that realisation came too late. On these services, the killer knew, you often hit retweet, like or share before you realize just quite what you have done.
Twitter and Facebook moved quickly to suspend the accounts of Flanagan. But not quickly enough.
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By the time his social presence had come down, his videos had been shared widely by journalists and ordinary users, jumping beyond the Internet onto morning TV broadcasts, and downloaded and reposted across the Internet — where, with some searching, they will most likely remain accessible indefinitely.
Also found after the killings was a demo reel posted to YouTube, showing Flanagan’s various appearances as a TV news anchor and reporter.
It is unsurprising, given his familiarity with the subject, that he appeared well versed with what has become the media ritual of killing. — New York Times News Service