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Aspiring to be responsible members of the media, it is difficult to comment on something as tragic as what occurred at Virginia Tech. While the story is certainly newsworthy, hordes of media members who flock to a town like Blacksburg in the wake of such a tragedy undermine the gravity of the situation. Television correspondents and print media invoke the same sympathetic inflections they honed at the local level when sensationalizing robberies and house fires.
To be sure, there is a lot of money to be made in this industry, and given the conditioning of their audiences, pulling on heart strings will naturally be profitable. However, the ubiquity of information, complete with sound bites and graphics packages, desensitizes the audience to the grave nature of truly tragic events. While a photograph of a maniac pointing a gun at a camera hooks the audience, it focuses attention on the one person who deserves none.
There were an estimated four to five acres of satellite trucks accompanying over 600 reporters just 24 hours after the attack at Virginia Tech. At a time when a small community must have been in utter shock at the circumstances, it seems unlikely that the prying video cameras, microphones, and prolix commentary surrounding the tragedy were beneficial to the victims.
The Cardinal had the opportunity to hastily supply its own coverage of the event, considering it occurred on a Monday, and the Cardinal prints on Tuesdays. However, the editors determined that in light of the saturation of the story through other media outlets, it would be inappropriate to write impulse articles based only on the second-hand coverage of others, which at the time provided very limited information.
While indeed our reporters began talking to students around the University of Louisville, it seemed initially that most students didn’t really know what was going on with the situation unfolding 385 miles away. Mega media outlets like CNN, Fox News and MSNBC were all reporting different details of the story; some online and TV news sources even offered differing death tolls across their tickers in the early hours after the story broke. With that in mind, the Cardinal’s editors felt it would be largely irresponsible to prematurely print ideas about which so little was known.
Indeed, a tragedy occurred in our nation, but bomb threats, hoax packages and a barrage of concerns about campus safety have hit closer to home for many. Thus, we hope this week’s edition will help you, our readers, make sense of all that has gone on here, around you – not just in the national spotlight – since last Monday.
