Tag: wdbj 7
Vester Flanagan Has Made Witnesses Of Us All

Vester Flanagan Has Made Witnesses Of Us All

“I’ve seen enough. I don’t want to see any more” — Bruce Springsteen, “Cover Me”

When terrorists beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 and posted video of the killing online, I refused to look. I explained my reasoning in this space. To watch that video, I wrote, knowing it was staged specifically to fill me with revulsion and fear, would feel like cooperating with the monsters who killed him. It would make me an accomplice.

I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want that blood on my soul.

Not long after that column appeared, I did see Pearl die. The video of his killing showed up in my inbox, sent by a stranger. Before I even knew what was going on, a terrorist was on my computer screen holding up the head of this 38-year-old husband and expectant father.

And I learned a sobering truth about murder and media in the new millennium. Increasingly, the decision about what we will and will not see is not ours to make. Increasingly, we are at the mercy, not simply of murderous monsters, but also of our own friends, family and colleagues who act as their henchmen, forwarding, retweeting and reposting their grisly misdeeds as casually as neighbors in another age might have shared recipes over the back fence.

If there were ever any doubt about that, what happened last Wednesday morning on live local television in Roanoke, Virginia, just laid them to rest. It wasn’t just that former WDBJ news reporter Vester Lee Flanagan II shot and killed two former colleagues — news reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward — as they interviewed local official Vicki Gardner, who was wounded but is expected to survive.

Wretched as it was, that kind of event is ordinary in America, the fabric of any given Wednesday. But Flanagan, who committed suicide as police closed in on him hours later, went well beyond the wretched ordinary. He filmed the murder with his cellphone, tweeted about it, posted the video on Facebook. For good measure, he faxed his manifesto to ABC News; it is said to be a 23-page rant in which Flanagan, who was black and gay, blames racism, homophobia, the Charleston massacre and micromanaging former bosses for sending him over the edge. He also expresses his dislike for whites, Latinos and blacks, and his admiration for the mass killers who shot up Columbine High and Virginia Tech.

In other words, he curated this murder, used tools of social media — and traditional media — to manage it like a PR campaign. In essence, he provided us his press kit. And while that bespeaks a deranged man’s incomprehensible narcissism, it also suggests a canny understanding of his target audience: us.

Indeed, within hours, the video of Flanagan’s atrocity was so ubiquitous online that Ella, one of my colleagues, posted that she was signing off for the day after being ambushed by it. She was, she wrote, just “being silly” with Facebook friends, and the next thing she knew, there was death, live on her screen. “I can’t stop crying. I wasn’t ready… What are we becoming?”

“The world,” wrote William Wordsworth, “is too much with us.” This was in 1806, 200 years before the first tweets and Facebook postings. Yet the poet’s words seem to capture something true about our time, when we live cheek by jowl online, connected to one another in ways he could never have imagined, and some people post murder porn like a new music video, as if it has never occurred to them that not everyone will not want to see this — or can bear to do so.

You’d think you’d have a right to make that decision for yourself. But these days, apparently, that’s no longer your call to make.

This, then, is Vester Flanagan’s perverse triumph. He has made witnesses of us all.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Photo: WDBJ reporter Alison Parker (L) is pictured interviewing Vicki Gardner before a gun is fired at her in this still image from video posted to the Facebook account of Bryce Williams, in Moneta, Virginia, August 26, 2015. REUTERS/via Facebook/Handout via Reuters

Social Media Feeds Violent Narcissism Of Alienated Young Men

Social Media Feeds Violent Narcissism Of Alienated Young Men

We watched, so the Virginia shooter got just what he wanted.

We were horrified, sickened, stricken, but still we watched as a deranged gunman fired several shots and murdered two young journalists on live television, wounding their interview subject as well.

Alison Parker, 24, and her cameraman, Adam Ward, 27, were conducting a news report for their Roanoke, Virginia, TV station, interviewing Vicki Gardner, a local chamber of commerce official. It seemed a routine story, a staple of small-city local news broadcasts.

But its ending was anything but routine: A disgruntled former employee of the station came up behind them, paused a few seconds, and then opened fire. (I refuse to use the shooter’s name; he’s had more than enough publicity.)

We watched, so the gunman was gratified.

Psychologists tell us that our violent video age will breed more like him, more angry narcissists hungry for notoriety, for attention, for, well, viewers. In a carefully planned attack, he apparently wore a body camera to capture his savagery; he then uploaded the video to his social media accounts.

Responsible news editors refused to show the most explicit footage, and Facebook and Twitter responded quickly to shut the shooter down.

But the video undoubtedly lives on in the Internet’s murky underworld. This is the modern version of the Roman Colosseum, a 21st-century update of public executions.

And, yet, it was uniquely American, the sort of horror show for which we have developed a worldwide reputation. While social media are in use everywhere — jihadists have used them to publicize their own gruesome executions — only in the United States do we allow madmen easy access to firearms. We have created the perfect conditions for turning places of work, of learning, of worship into shooting galleries, targets for the mentally unstable, the angry and unhinged.

According to a recent study, there are more public mass shootings in the United States than in any other country in the world. (The study, conducted by University of Alabama criminologist Adam Lankford, counts only incidents in which four or more people are killed and excludes gang killings and domestic, or family, episodes. The Virginia shooting, horrific though it was, would not have been counted.)

Between 1966 and 2012, there were 90 mass shootings in the United States. That’s nearly a third of the 292 mass shootings around the world, in a country with only 5 percent of the global population. America’s high rate of gun ownership “appears connected to its high percentage of mass shootings,” Lankford wrote.

Parker’s father, Andy Parker, told CNN that he would fight for stronger firearms regulations, denouncing as “cowards” those politicians who kowtow before the gun lobby. “Look, I’m for the Second Amendment, but there has to be a way to force politicians who are cowards and in the pocket of the NRA to come to grips and have sensible laws so that crazy people can’t get guns,” he said.

He’s right, of course. I admire not only his willingness to speak out, but also his ability to string rational sentences together, given what he and his family are going through.

Still, his crusade is unlikely to bear fruit. He can join the countless other grieving families before him — there are enough to populate a small city — who tried to give meaning to their loss by fighting for sensible firearms regulations. Even the families of the Sandy Hook children — 20 kids and seven adults were killed in an elementary school in Connecticut in 2012 — were unable to budge a Congress in thrall to the National Rifle Association.

The cowardice of Congress was not assuaged by public opinion polls, which show overwhelming support for measures such as broader background checks on gun buyers. But the gun lobby threatens to defeat any person who suggests that individuals shouldn’t have their own shoulder-fired rocket launchers, and, apparently, politicians value livelihood over principle.

So there will be more bloodshed. There will be more angry and alienated young men who find it easy to grab a gun and commit a monstrous crime. And given the Virginia shooter’s creative savagery, there will be more video footage of helpless victims.

We’ll be watching.

(Cynthia Tucker won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Photo: A tweet apparently from the shooter of WDBJ7 reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward appears to show the shooting during a live broadcast from Bridgewater Plaza, August 26, 2015. Handout via Twitter

Virginia TV station ‘At A Loss’ To Explain Why Fired Worker Shot Pair 2 Years Later

Virginia TV station ‘At A Loss’ To Explain Why Fired Worker Shot Pair 2 Years Later

By Matt Pearce, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

As the cameras rolled Thursday morning, WDBJ-TV morning anchor Kimberly McBroom reached out to hold her colleagues’ hands.

It was 6:45 a.m., and McBroom told her viewers in southwest Virginia that the staffers at the Roanoke TV station were approaching a moment “none of us will forget.”

“It was yesterday around this time that we went live to Alison Parker and photojournalist Adam Ward,” McBroom said, tremors of emotion creeping into her voice as she and other station staff members held a 30-second, on-air moment of silence.

Parker, 24, and Ward, 27, were shot and killed on live television in a shocking ambush by one of their former co-workers at the television station, Vester Lee Flanagan II, 41, who went by the on-air name of Bryce Williams.

McBroom was the anchor on duty at the station Wednesday morning when the pair were shot and Ward’s camera tumbled to the ground, capturing Flanagan marching forward with a gun in his hand before the feed cut back to an astonished McBroom at the anchor desk.

The pair had been interviewing a local Chamber of Commerce leader, Vicki Gardner, who was wounded but is expected to survive.

Flanagan later shot and killed himself, but not before posting video he took of the shooting on Twitter and Facebook. He also apparently sent an angry manifesto to ABC News complaining about workplace bullying and praising the mass shootings at Virginia Tech and Columbine High School.

In the rental car Flanagan crashed after a police chase, investigators found multiple license plates, a wig and 17 stamped letters, according to a search inventory released by officials Thursday.

Almost every element of Flanagan’s attack, which seemed maximized for public shock value, posed a challenge to journalism itself.

Across the nation, Flanagan’s on-air shooting and social media posts launched debates over whether media outlets should amplify the thoughts and actions that a killer specifically wanted the public to see.

Some news outlets declined to show the full videos. Others decided to republish the images, including the New York Daily News, which covered its Thursday front page with three freeze frames showing the moment Flanagan opened fire on a visibly shocked Parker. With its front-page story the Los Angeles Times published one freeze-frame image of Flanagan’s hand pointing a gun at the reporter.

The shooting tested the emotional and professional limits of WDBJ, where both victims were in romantic relationships with other staff members.

Since Wednesday the station has carried on under extraordinary circumstances.

Reporters have reported about co-workers, while live shots have been canceled out of an abundance of caution. Sobs have been heard off-set as staff members processed their emotions on-air. After Flanagan shot himself but before he died at a hospital, the station’s manager admitted on camera Wednesday that he wasn’t sure whether he wanted Flanagan to live or die.

Flanagan’s stint at the station was tumultuous, according to court records from a discrimination lawsuit he filed against it in 2014. The case was dismissed.

Flanagan worked at the station for less than a year after he was hired in March 2012, following several years spent out of the industry. In internal memos made public as part of the lawsuit, the station’s then-news director Dan Dennison detailed several episodes in which Flanagan had used hostile dialogue and body language with co-workers, especially photographers.

In one July 2012 memo, Dennison ordered Flanagan to undergo employee counseling or lose his job for creating a “hostile work environment,” which officials said Flanagan completed.

Flanagan was fired in February 2013 for poor news judgment and poor relationships with his colleagues, according to the station.
Another memo detailed his stormy exit from the TV station, which prompted managers to call police to escort Flanagan out. Flanagan threw a wooden cross at one manager and said, “You’re going to need this.” Flanagan, who was black, also accused the station of racism for keeping a watermelon in a hallway.

On his way out of the station, Flanagan flipped off Ward, who was recording the incident, and told the photographer to “lose your big gut,” according to the memo.

At a news conference outside the station Thursday, General Manager Jeffrey A. Marks said none of Flanagan’s complaints of discrimination was substantiated by management, by a court or by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where Flanagan had lodged an unsuccessful complaint.

In the two years since the firing, Flanagan had been seen around town but did not talk to or confront any station employees, Marks said.

“We are still at a loss to figure out what happened to him in those 2 years,” Marks said, flanked by a couple dozen station employees wearing ribbons honoring Ward and Parker. “But most of our time we are spending focused on the results of his actions yesterday, the loss of Adam and Alison, and our bond with the community, which has been so strong for the last 30 hours or so.”

The station, which has vowed to cover the aftermath of the shooting with fairness, has received support from local community members dropping off flowers and meals and from journalism outlets around the world.

Two Springfield, Mo., television stations have sent staff to help. KY3 anchor Steve Grant, KY3 reporter Eric Hilt and KSPR news director Bridget Lovelle have been sent for at least a few days, the Springfield News-Leader reported.

Grant was already on air Thursday morning as McBroom, the morning anchor, paid tribute to her colleagues and their final story, a light feature about the 50th anniversary of the man-made Smith Mountain Lake, about 25 miles southeast of Roanoke.

“It was during a conversation with (Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce Executive Director) Vicki Gardner — about another reason why we love living here — when the peacefulness of our community was shattered,” McBroom said.

“As we approach that moment, we want to pause and reflect, and we want to share with you once again what made these two so special, not just to us, but to all of our hometowns that WDBJ-7 serves,” she said.

During the moment of silence, the feed switched to photos of Parker and Ward, both smiling in their official station portraits.
Below their pictures, at the bottom of the screen, a news ticker continued to scroll details of other breaking stories. The world of news hadn’t slowed down, and neither would WDBJ-TV.

Photo: Vester Lee Flanagan, who was known on-air as Bryce Williams is shown in this handout photo from TV station WDBJ7 obtained by Reuters August 26, 2015. (REUTERS/WDBJ7/Handout via Reuters)

‘If I Have To Be The John Walsh Of Gun Control’: Victim’s Father To Become Advocate

‘If I Have To Be The John Walsh Of Gun Control’: Victim’s Father To Become Advocate

The father of a victim in Wednesday’s murder of the local WDBJ7-TV crew in Virginia is quickly emerging as a new spokesman for gun control — saying that he’s determined to see to it that these mass shootings don’t keep happening.

“Alison was our bright, shining light, and it was cruelly extinguished by yet another crazy person with a gun,” Andy Parker, whose 24-year old daughter Alison Parker was killed by a deranged ex-employee at the TV station, said in a statement on Wednesday. “She excelled at everything she did and was loved by everyone she touched. She loved us dearly, and we talked to her every single day. Not hearing her voice again crushes my soul.”

That night, Parker and his late daughter’s fiancé Chris Hurst appeared together on Fox News’ The Kelly File — with host Megyn Kelly grateful and amazed that the two were even able to appear on television under such emotionally fraught circumstances.

While discussing his daughter’s life, and that of her murdered co-worker Adam Ward, Parker proclaimed his new cause:

I’m not gonna let this issue drop. We have got to do something about crazy people getting guns. And the problem that you guys have is — and I know it’s the news business — this is a big story, but next week it ain’t gonna be a story anymore, and everybody’s gonna forget it. But you mark my words, my mission in life — and I talked to the governor [Terry McAuliffe] today. He called me, and he said — and I told him, I said, ‘I’m gonna do something, whatever it takes, to get gun legislation — to shame people, to shame legislators into doing something about closing loopholes in background checks, and making sure crazy people don’t get guns.’ And he said, ‘You go, I’m right there with you.’ So, you know, this is not the last you’ve heard of me. This is something that is Alison’s legacy that I want to make happen.

Parker also appeared Monday morning on CNN’s New Day show, and told Chris Cuomo:

Her life was cut short. She had so much potential, and it’s senseless that her life and Adam’s life were taken by a crazy person with a gun. And if I have to be the John Walsh of gun control — look, I’m for the Second Amendment, but there has to be a way to force politicians that are cowards and in the pockets of the NRA to come to grips, and make sense — have sensible laws so that crazy people can’t get guns. It can’t be that hard. And yet, politicians from the local level, to the state level, to the national level — they sidestep the issue, they kick the can down the road. This can’t happen anymore.