Media violence may be casting shadow over Virginia Tech tragedy

Media violence may be casting shadow over Virginia Tech tragedy

Two photo poses taken by Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui, which were included in the video inside the package he sent to NBC this week, are being examined by investigators because of their similarity to images from a three-year old South Korean film. Police are reportedly examining whether Cho may have been trying to copy violence in the film, a theory that an author and media awareness advocate says would fit an already rampant pattern.

It was an instructor at the Blacksburg, Virginia, school who allegedly helped to connect the dots between the shooting and the movie, according to Teresa Tomeo, a veteran broadcast journalist and author of the book, Noise: How Our Media Saturated Culture Dominates Lives and Dismantles Families (Ascension Press, 2007).

"The New York Times was actually alerted by a professor at Virginia Tech who was aware of the South Korean film that came out three years ago," Tomeo points out. "It’s called Old Boy," she says, and "it actually won some awards at the Cannes Film Festival back in [2004].”

Old Boy, a film that Sky News says critics have labeled "an ultra-violent movie of obsession and revenge," has scenes of an individual holding a gun to his head and another holding a hammer ready to strike -- both of which are apparently copied by Cho on the "manifesto" video.

Therein, the journalist thinks, may lie the clues that offer further evidence of mass-scale real-life violence spurred by exposure to agression and violence in media. “Some of the well-known TV psychologists," she notes, "are saying that the type of murders he committed, at least, the way he carried them out, were very, very similar … to what happened in Columbine and what happened in these other school shootings where numerous people were killed -- very methodical, very systematic, little emotion.”

Tomeo says the Paducah, Kentucky, high school shooters were said to be connected to the fantasy scenes in the film Basketball Diaries; and the gunmen in Columbine (Colorado) High School's shootings, to the video game, "Doom." Information from Cho's roommates is making clearer in his case the shooter's probable connection with the film, Old Boy.

“If his roommates were saying -- and they have been saying all week long -- that he was ‘addicted to violence,’ then not only was this film influential," the author of Noise observes, "but I’m sure we’re going to see at some point some connection with video games, because we’re seeing this over and over and over again.”

The bigger issue than Cho Seung-Hui's rampage, Tomeo asserts, is the culture of death that generates solutions to life by involving violence in its media, and then is able to find no one in the media willing to be responsible for those messages. Yet, she says, medical organizations and research groups continue to document their connections to "senseless acts" taking place every day,

"I think overall we can see what these types of things can do to our society," Tomeo adds. She says it is time both the media and media consumers take the issue of media violence and its effects seriously.