Nicole Gelinas has some thoughts on how Cho Seung-Hui "expertly manipulated NBC and its competitors":

Why did NBC News—as well as its competitors and print-media counterparts—show that video? Through the spectacular posthumous attention that the media have awarded him, Cho Seung-Hui has shown just how easy it is for an intelligent killer to manipulate sophisticated news organizations into serving as barely filtered propaganda pipelines.

Mass killers don’t operate in a vacuum, and Cho learned well from Columbine mass murderers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. The Columbine killers made their own propaganda to accompany their attack, but they didn’t think to send it directly to the media before they killed 12 high school classmates and a teacher. Investigators kept most of the material that the two teens had created away from the public for years, until interest had waned (their major work, a video that they spent a year making, remains under government seal to this day). Klebold and Harris got famous, but they never planned well enough to use their mayhem as a platform to speak directly to the public.

Webloggin has edited together a montage of NBC's promotional clips "to see how shamelessly they morphed the story about Cho into a story about Cho sending the video and manifesto to NBC. No wonder parents, relatives and friends are upset".

NBC's decision to air Cho's material has been the subject of virtually all of Hugh Hewitt's radio show today. Watch for transcripts and audio clips later tonight or tomorrow morning if you missed it.

Hugh's co-blogger Dean Barnett adds, "One wonders exactly how low the 21st century mainstream media can ultimately go".

It's a Red Queen's Race to the bottom.