carocat.co.uk

First of all I’d like to make clear that I am very sorry for anyone involved in the horrific attacs, including the students, their families and friends, the emergency personnel and the parents of the attacker Tim K. It’s shocking that this has happened and it shouldn’t have.

Also, this post isn’t really very contstructed, more a list of thoughts and anger with media overheard since the attacks on Wednesday.

To anyone reading this not knowing what I’m going on about [surprising seeing this has gone around the world since!], this Wikipedia article somewhat sums it all up.

• Yes, something very bad has happened and as such needs reporting, but there’s no place for sensational reporting that Germany has seen over the last few days which have then been taking internationally. All news and bits of information have to be verified before making them public even if that takes a couple hours more.
• The German news channel n-tv showed the MySpace profile of Tim K.; only that happened to be one from a completely different Tim K. living in Frankfurt which is roughly about 130 miles away from Winnenden. He received threatening and some quite disgusting messages in which people aired their anger, obviously misdirected.
• Via the wrong MySpace profile people also found the YouTube profile of the same Tim K., a rather bad rapper, assumed he announced the attacks through his music and left more messages.
• Several online sites claimed Tim K. had a ‘Killerspiel’ listed in his Amazon wishlist. Just a shame said wishlist belongs to a Tim K. in Brandenburg which is roughly 430 miles away from Winnenden.
• Allegedly Tim K. announced the attacks on the internet, a site called Krautchan which as an aside is a pretty cool sitename. The site’s gone offline and released a statement:
  

  Unfortunately, our tiny server can’t handle the current rush. There’s nothing to see anyway, since the German press was unfortunately fooled (and probably not for the first time either) by a forgery.

  No killing spree was announced here, there are only people who know how to use Photoshop.

  Apparently, researching is considered uncool nowadays. It’s bad enough to copy from Wikipedia, but from here? Christ.

  By the way, we don’t know what exactly the authorities claim to have found on the perpetrator’s PC. Maybe he visited the site, but he definitely didn’t write the post that went through the news, because that one never existed.

• Reporters waiting in the neighbour’s garden hoping to catch a glimpse of Tim K.’s family which at this point had long been picked up by the police for questioning and most likely protection. It’s just taking it too far..
• And of course the extremely bad reporting done by the Bild paper which not only listed surviving students as dead and posted pictures of dead ones taken from social networking sites, but also created many false stories out of thin air or rather under the guise “as seen by our sketch artist” who must have been working overtime. For example they claim Tim K. wore a combat suit when an eye-witness account on the same page [ironically from a girl the Bild claimed aday before was dead] stated something different.