When NBC rolled the tapes and burned the images of Seung Hui Cho into millions of our memory banks, my mind went back to 1999 and media coverage of Columbine.
We tend to forget that in the pre-9/11 era, the epidemic of school shootings was the scariest story American parents had to face in US media.
At the time, I was a London based correspondent for ABC News and there was much in the coverage of Columbine, on my network and elsewhere, that bothered me.
There was Time magazine, for instance, and the cover of its May 3rd, 1999 edition. It showed small, yearbook-style pictures of each of the 12 people killed, few of whose faces readers will remember because they were dwarfed by two huge pictures of their murderers.
The cover came with a headline: What Made Them Do It?
I don't think I've ever seen a dumber cover on an otherwise smart news magazine. Time would later report the two killers "were desperate to be famous and wanted Quentin Tarantino to make a movie about them". Time's editors were helping to ensure the murderers would get their wish at least partially fulfilled.
I subscribe to the theory that school shootings are usually carried out by troubled teenagers or attention seekers who would rather be dead celebrities, than live unknowns.
The Virginia Tech shootings and the emergence of Cho's tapes put the media's role in these stories where it belongs: under the microscope.
In Brian Williams' post on this site he implied that, when NBC decided to air the material, the greater good and not ratings were at the forefront of NBC's thinking. He said "Our first step was to call law enforcement and hand over the originals."
Actually, that's wrong. Prior to handing over the master tape, NBC made copies of it. So they could be the first to put Seung Hui Cho on the air.
There were other factors that made Brian Williams' justifications for the way NBC behaved that day rather hard to believe.
NBC held the Cho video back for almost eight hours before rolling it out on Williams' Nightly News, which only recently fell into second place in the ratings behind ABC's World News Tonight. Nothing like an exclusive to get a ratings spike.
Williams said the arrival of the tape in the NBC mail room "thrust us into a role we did not seek and did not want". That doesn't quite square with the network's insistence that it be credited by any other news organization that used the images after NBC did.
The president of NBC News, Steve Capus, was quoted in the New York Times, on whether airing the material was proper. "The news-value question is long gone," Mr. Capus said. "Every journalist is united on this."
Mr. Capus was wrong and he knew it. His own early morning anchor, Matt Lauer, said on the Today show that there were big differences of opinion within NBC News over whether the material should have been aired.
Williams on the same point: "I do not know of a reputable news organization that would have stopped after that first step (and not aired the video)".
Perhaps Brian Williams has never heard of the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The CBC recently had a college shooting in Montreal to cover, in which one person was killed and nineteen were wounded.
The network's editor in chief, Tony Burman, said the CBC has since been examining its coverage of school shootings, talking about its concerns over glorification and the risk of provoking copycat killers.
When the NBC video emerged, the CBC made a policy decision not to air it.
Editor in Chief Burman wrote, in his blog:
"At the CBC, we debated the issue throughout the evening and made the decision that we would not broadcast any video or audio of this bizarre collection. We would report the essence of what the killer was saying, but not do what he so clearly hoped all media would do. To decide otherwise - in our view -would be to risk copycat killings."
Burman went on:
"Speaking personally, I have long admired NBC News and I am sure my admiration of their journalists will endure. But I think their handling of these tapes was a mistake. As I watched them last night, sickened as I'm sure most viewers were, I imagined what kind of impact this broadcast would have on similarly deranged people. In horrific but real ways, this is their 15 seconds of fame. I had this awful and sad feeling that there were parents watching these excerpts on NBC who were unaware they they will lose their children in some future copycat killing triggered by these broadcasts."
This may sound like some form of journalistic treason, but it's hard not to agree with Burman. Airing videos like Cho's plays into the hands of some very troubled people.
News organizations need to report on the causes of such tragedies; the family backgrounds involved; the social dynamics; the struggles at school; the possible drug angles and the teenage penchant for suicide.
But the media must also realize that for people like Cho, media exposure is not just a by-product of their actions; it's not just part of a process. It is the end game.
I don't buy the slippery slope argument that journalists rely on too often; that censoring this kind of material brings us one step closer to censorship, full stop. That's a self serving canard that media use in order to avoid the kind of criticism all institutions can benefit from.
And yes, I understand that anyone who wants to learn the names of the killers can just go on the internet. However, there's a big difference between pro-actively going online (think: porn) and media companies bombarding us with images that we could not possibly escape without locking ourselves away in the dark.
The criticism NBC has faced does provide a silver lining. It ensures the network will not be able to go back to the video and roll it out every time Brian Williams and Matt Lauer are in a ratings slump.
Back in 1999, Time magazine did five cover stories on the Columbine massacre. Its Managing Editor defended the obsession at the time, saying the Columbine "story is not so much about kids seeking glory as it is about grownups not looking and seeing."
No grown up armed with a brain believes that. Time magazine then, and NBC now, need to understand that we're looking at the role the media play in these tragedies, and we don't like what we see.