NEW YORK — The oversized U.S. Postal Service envelope was addressed simply to "NBC," and might have been overlooked in the jumble of mail flooding into the television network's Rockefeller Center headquarters Wednesday if a sharp-eyed mail carrier hadn't noticed the return address: "Blacksburg, Va." The sender: "Ishmael."
Those clues were enough to alarm the Postal Service employee, who flagged the mailroom when he dropped it off about 11 a.m. NBC security officials were immediately called to examine the package.
Inside, they found a lengthy document featuring more than 40 photos of Seung-hui Cho with handguns and other weapons, accompanied by a rambling, 1,800-word, profanity-laced diatribe. A separate DVD contained two dozen Quicktime videos of the Virginia Tech senior raging about the wealthy and insisting that he was pushed to violence.
"You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option," Cho said in one of the videos in which he compared himself to Jesus and the two teenage killers at Columbine High School.
The "multimedia manifesto," as it was dubbed by network anchor Brian Williams, offered the first extensive window on the gunman responsible for the worst school shooting in U.S. history -- and handed NBC a major exclusive on a story that has dominated the news all week.
The unforeseen bonanza of information forced the network to juggle its urge to be first with the legal and ethical implications of broadcasting the materials. Could airing the materials compromise the investigation or glorify Cho's actions?
"This is very difficult," said Steve Capus, president of the news division. "We're all looking for unique angles. You just hope all of your training as journalists and as good citizens comes to bear."
Capus said the network immediately notified law enforcement officials about the package and delayed reporting about it until investigators announced its existence.
Only then, after extensive internal deliberations with Williams, standards officials and other news executives, did he decide to air excerpts of Cho's rantings, first broadcast on "NBC Nightly News" on Wednesday evening.
"Everybody wanted to know, 'Why did he do this, why carry out such a hateful act,' " Capus said. "I think this is as close as we will ever come to understanding, and for that reason we needed to release some of this."
