Constructing Effects: Disturbing Images and the News Construction of ‘media influence’ in the Virginia Tech Shootings

Abstract

News photographs can often provide troubling or problematic images. When Cho Seung Hui posted a package of videos, photographs and texts to the media in the midst of a shooting spree at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in April 2007 which left 32 dead, he provided them with pictures which were particularly controversial. These were the planned and orchestrated self-representations of a mass murderer, and were therefore immediately examined and interrogated for explanatory clues both by the police and the media. In this chapter, the ways in which these images were utilized in media discourses to explain the shootings is investigated via a content analysis of UK newspapers, with a particular emphasis on media effects as a frame of understanding. This framing occurred through the identification of the film Oldboy (Chan-wook Park, 2003), a ‘chilling horror-revenge movie’ (Hawkins 2009),¹ as a potential influence on Cho both in terms of the shootings themselves and, in a more limited sense, in terms of the images he produced as part of his ‘multimedia manifesto’.