Andrew Nachison!

I really enjoyed listening to Mr. Nachison on Thursday. He is clearly a bright man and understands this new age of journalism as well as anyone. However, because a tragic, yet historic event like the Virginia Tech shootings occurred this week, I found our discussion about how the media has handled this event most interesting.

Most of our discussion revolved around the question, should NBC have released the pictures and video clips that the shooter sent to them. My personal opinion is that they did not really have a choice but to release it. In fact I felt the way they handled the situation was very professional. It was a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. If they release the pictures and video clips, everyone will be telling them it was insensitive. If they do not release the pictures and video clips, everyone will complain that one of the leading news organizations in the world did not release information that they had to the public.

Brian Williams was the first to release the clips on the NBC Nightly News and I felt he gave viewers a fair warning and clearly they did not show everything, instead it seemed as if they chose some of the less violent material to show. It was all disturbing, but from what I understand they could have shown worse. I was working in the CBS sports department when the news broke and myself as well as many professional news anchors were huddled around the television. At the end of the Nightly News, the comments from many of the CBS news anchors were "wow Brian Williams is good," or "wow they handled that smoothly."

Today with youtube.com and google's video search, everything will be leaked to the public in a matter of hours, not days. I think we now live in a world where the public can publish information just as well and just as fast as the professionals can, only professionals are deemed credible while information the public disseminates is viewed with a certain level of caution.