Tragedy and the media
This shooting at Virginia Tech is one of those occasions that makes me relieved I’m no longer a daily broadcast reporter.
I know something like this is unique in many ways, but it’s also a story that gets told over and over, unfortunately: Tragic event -> inspiring restoration. It’s not that it’s boring to cover those kinds of things, obviously, but you start to see the formulaic approaches the media takes and I guess it just seems like one bugler playing taps and one artistically-blurred candlelight vigil kind of blends depressingly into another. I know they have to cover these events and these days, they have to cover them 24 hours per news cycle, but I can say I don’t miss taking part in that kind of story.
Even if you’re not covering such a story on the scene, sometimes you get sucked into them anyway, often in the dumbest possible ways. I remember on 9/11, when I was already out of radio and at the paper, we were pretty much in the same boat as everybody else in the country without much to do but watch the pictures. But even though I worked for a weekly local business publication in Greensboro, the editorial urge to “localize”, which is apparently about as primal as those to fornicate and eat, kicked in, so I was told to call up the Jefferson-Pilot building, the most prominent building on the Greensboro “skyline” to find out if they were doing anything to beef up security.
This was incredibly lame on a variety of levels. For one thing, under what circumstances would terrorist masterminds hatch themselves a scheme to attack the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the White House and the Jefferson-Pilot building in Greensboro, North Carolina? And if such a threat were remotely plausible, did this insurance company keep an anti-aircraft battery in the basement for just such an occasion? But I called and asked, and sure enough, they had a prepared statement ready because they’d already been asked by several other local media outlets.
Maybe its because the aftermath of these things do often look so similar that I don’t bother to watch much of the coverage on TV. One bit I did see was of one of the student vigils at which the students made a point of wearing their school sweatshirts because, as one of the girls explained, they wanted everyone to know that VT was still a good school. Everybody grieves in their own way, of course, but I thought the urge to protect the reputation of their alma mater as a top priority was curious.
It reminded me of the bonfire collapse at Texas A&M that I covered back in 1999. A&M’s bonfire was a yearly ritual that took place before the big game with the University of Texas, during which hundreds of basically unsupervised students, many of them drunk, would spend 24 hours a day for several days building a massive bonfire out of thousands of telephone-pole-sized logs stacked on end without benefit of anything resembling an engineering plan or enforced safety rules.
It was exactly and every bit as stupid as it sounds, and it had fallen down before though never with any loss of life. But this time, with the stack almost complete, in the middle of the night with lots of students working, the whole thing collapsed, crushing a dozen people to death and injuring a bunch more. Coming from Houston we got up there a couple of hours after it happened and reported on it for a couple of days. This naturally involved getting lots of student reactions to the tragedy, and I remember being struck by how many of the students felt that the most important thing, their very top concern, was that this might in some way tarnish A&M or, heaven forbid, the “bonfire tradition.”
Now, this is obviously different because the VT tragedy involved a lunatic with a gun, which can happen anywhere and is more or less unpreventable by any reasonable means, whereas the tragedy at A&M would have been 100 percent preventable if the people responsible for letting this obvious deathtrap happen year after year simply hadn’t been idiots. But that makes the gut reaction to rush to their defense all the more curious. I chalk it up to the fact that Texas A&M has so many Texans at it. At least the university ended the bonfire afterwards, though now of course the students apparently just build it off-campus.
Anyway, enough of that. We’re off to Wilmington for a long weekend at this little place we’ve wanted to go to for a long time. It is pet-friendly but also looks to have very nice gardens and furnishings. I’m hoping it still looks as nice after a visit from our Vicious Pack of Hounds.
I know something like this is unique in many ways, but it’s also a story that gets told over and over, unfortunately: Tragic event -> inspiring restoration. It’s not that it’s boring to cover those kinds of things, obviously, but you start to see the formulaic approaches the media takes and I guess it just seems like one bugler playing taps and one artistically-blurred candlelight vigil kind of blends depressingly into another. I know they have to cover these events and these days, they have to cover them 24 hours per news cycle, but I can say I don’t miss taking part in that kind of story.
Even if you’re not covering such a story on the scene, sometimes you get sucked into them anyway, often in the dumbest possible ways. I remember on 9/11, when I was already out of radio and at the paper, we were pretty much in the same boat as everybody else in the country without much to do but watch the pictures. But even though I worked for a weekly local business publication in Greensboro, the editorial urge to “localize”, which is apparently about as primal as those to fornicate and eat, kicked in, so I was told to call up the Jefferson-Pilot building, the most prominent building on the Greensboro “skyline” to find out if they were doing anything to beef up security.
This was incredibly lame on a variety of levels. For one thing, under what circumstances would terrorist masterminds hatch themselves a scheme to attack the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the White House and the Jefferson-Pilot building in Greensboro, North Carolina? And if such a threat were remotely plausible, did this insurance company keep an anti-aircraft battery in the basement for just such an occasion? But I called and asked, and sure enough, they had a prepared statement ready because they’d already been asked by several other local media outlets.
Maybe its because the aftermath of these things do often look so similar that I don’t bother to watch much of the coverage on TV. One bit I did see was of one of the student vigils at which the students made a point of wearing their school sweatshirts because, as one of the girls explained, they wanted everyone to know that VT was still a good school. Everybody grieves in their own way, of course, but I thought the urge to protect the reputation of their alma mater as a top priority was curious.
It reminded me of the bonfire collapse at Texas A&M that I covered back in 1999. A&M’s bonfire was a yearly ritual that took place before the big game with the University of Texas, during which hundreds of basically unsupervised students, many of them drunk, would spend 24 hours a day for several days building a massive bonfire out of thousands of telephone-pole-sized logs stacked on end without benefit of anything resembling an engineering plan or enforced safety rules.
It was exactly and every bit as stupid as it sounds, and it had fallen down before though never with any loss of life. But this time, with the stack almost complete, in the middle of the night with lots of students working, the whole thing collapsed, crushing a dozen people to death and injuring a bunch more. Coming from Houston we got up there a couple of hours after it happened and reported on it for a couple of days. This naturally involved getting lots of student reactions to the tragedy, and I remember being struck by how many of the students felt that the most important thing, their very top concern, was that this might in some way tarnish A&M or, heaven forbid, the “bonfire tradition.”
Now, this is obviously different because the VT tragedy involved a lunatic with a gun, which can happen anywhere and is more or less unpreventable by any reasonable means, whereas the tragedy at A&M would have been 100 percent preventable if the people responsible for letting this obvious deathtrap happen year after year simply hadn’t been idiots. But that makes the gut reaction to rush to their defense all the more curious. I chalk it up to the fact that Texas A&M has so many Texans at it. At least the university ended the bonfire afterwards, though now of course the students apparently just build it off-campus.
Anyway, enough of that. We’re off to Wilmington for a long weekend at this little place we’ve wanted to go to for a long time. It is pet-friendly but also looks to have very nice gardens and furnishings. I’m hoping it still looks as nice after a visit from our Vicious Pack of Hounds.
posted by Matt | 1:09 PM
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