Stine could have been speaking for the legion of commentators who spoke out about the on-camera shooting of two journalists and an interviewee in Virginia on Wednesday. But apparently, he wouldn’t be speaking for many people in the media.
Fictional on-screen killings are as common as weather reports. Real ones are rare: Jack Ruby’s killing of Lee Harvey Oswald two days after Oswald shot President Kennedy and a suicide on a Los Angeles freeway in 1998 are among the few that viewers could see as they happened.
In such unfolding situations, TV station managers can argue that they had no way of knowing that the incident would end the way it did and could not cut away in time. The real controversy centers on re-broadcast of the ghastly footage. Here, the suicide of Pennsylvania State Treasurer Budd Dwyer in 1987 enters the picture.