The tragedy at Virginia Tech is apparent and will plague the victims’ families, the community of Blacksburg, Va., as well as the rest of the nation for a very long time.
In my opinion, such a tragedy is only compounded by the media’s incessant coverage of what is clearly a very fresh and volatile situation.
After the school schooting tragedy at Columbine, I wrote the Bakersfield Californian expressing these same concerns.
When elementary schools start locking down their campuses because a 9-year-old student shows up at school with a list of names and a gun, well the media is just as much to blame as the parents.
Where did the student get the idea in the first place?
The next day, after the shootings at Virginia Tech, Bakersfield College received its own bomb threat.
I don’t know that such asinine copycat behavior can be avoided but I do believe that the media’s bleeding of the Virginia Tech story isn’t going to help.
As a journalist now, I began to question my own news judgment, having these feelings about the media behaving like vultures and yet also knowing that as journalists we do have a responsibility to report accurate and reliable information, especially when something as horrendous as this violent attack takes place in one of our own public universities.
I am confused by the degree of public interest and outrage over the Virginia Tech shootings. This is because everyday, our soldiers are still dying in a senseless war in Iraq.
Have people become hardened to the fact that everyday, someone in the U.S. is losing a family member due to the continued occupation of Iraq?
Besides the extreme nature of what took place at Virginia Tech, it’s apparent to me that this does affect our own campus and I feel it pertinent to ask just how safe we are at Bakersfield College, what precautions or plans are in place to protect us from something such as this?
I hope that The Renegade Rip’s involvement in this media frenzy will end there.
I have no interest in capitalizing on such senseless devastation and I loathe those news organizations that are.
I don’t need to see the shooter’s, Cho Seung-Hui, picture every two minutes. In fact, once was quite enough.
I hate that reporters were asking bereaved Virginia Tech students, the day after the shooting, whether they thought that the shootings would affect future admittance to their school.
What kind of question is that to ask someone and how is it even newsworthy?
As far as the media is concerned, I get it. They are all competing and trying to get a breaking scoop on the story.
The fact is that 32 students and faculty died senseless deaths, is pretty much the whole story.
Sure, there is more information we all want to know but all of the media organizations should pursue that information ethically and with taste. No, I don’t mean flavor, I mean that little guy, often referred to as conscience, who tells us when we’ve gone to far.
One of the questions I am most interested in having answered, is why the campus wasn’t locked down after the first two victims were found. But I will wait patiently and respectfully for the investigations to be concluded.
I do expect and hope that news organizations will conduct their own investigations, as I am not sure I want to be hand-fed the details by a politician or a law enforcement public relations officer.
The stories of the heroism of the students and faculty bring tears to my eyes and admiration in my heart for the spirit and strength of those that died due to their heroic deeds as well as those that lived and helped others to do the same.
I wish the media would just focus on that. I sincerely doubt that there’s a single American that doesn’t, by now, know what happened at Virginia Tech.
Everyone involved in the response and assistance of the victims are heroes. The Virginia Tech students, faculty, law enforcement, emergency medical technicians, doctors, and even the whole community pulled together and did what they could in a horrific situation.
I am sick of news agencies acting like sharks and regurgitating the same information every five minutes for weeks, even months at a time.
Their apparent lack of respect for the dead and the mourning process that many of the people in that community are going through disgusts me.
It’s behavior of journalists like that makes me question my own desire to make this a profession.