On the coverage of Virginia Tech

Okay, multiple opinions, feelings, and thoughts have been expressed on the whole Virginia Tech shooting, but the journalism community as a whole seems to be doing it wrong, rehashing the same old tried and true coverage from Columbine. Yeah, Columbine, you remember the last time a student went on a rampage? Rather than focus on the tragedy from multiple angles, we have the same things all over again: the gunman was a loner, the controls on guns should be stricter, and more supposed "trenchcoat mafia" antics. As an aspiring journalist myself, I have to ask: where the fuck do these people get off writing this?

Seriously, over a couple of beers last night, I watchd the coverage (Fox News) of the Virginia Tech shooting. And, while I would like to say that it was just the typical Fox News bullshit from Hanity and Colmes, it turned out to be the same thing almost verbatim from CNN and Time. I don't believe this shit. What happened to reporting both sides of the story? What happened to equal journalism: right now, I'm disgusted with my field as a whole and outraged at the shit that they're pulling.

Foremost, I don't see anything coming from the shooters families: only second hand reports and things that are public knowledge. Has the news media even made an attempt to contact the family, to speak with them and learn what's going on with them? If they have, they're not speaking about it. From what I've gathered, the closest thing to an interview was the mention of the police speaking with the parents for 90 minutes in a time story. Hardly an interview, but not exactly painting them in a bad light: every family must come to grips with what happened.

But that pales in comparison to the coverage of the shooter himself. Multiple reports paint him in the stereotypical trenchcoat mafia style: a quiet loner who wrote disturbing plays and poetry, with a recently acquired interest in firearms, and a few quirks. Albeit the focus on his stalking of women on campus and the usage of the "Question Mark" handle to pester said women and his roommates is a little disturbing, but those are just reported facts: I have yet to see an attempt by the news media to form a profile OUTSIDE the stereotype, to probe the thoughts and motivations of the shooter. Even the piece in Time about the shooter's dorm room was streatched thin: there was nothing there, and it came off to me like Bush's Error 404: WMDs Not Found. In this case, it's more like Error 404: psychotic motivations not found.

There's also the thing with the gun control advocates loosing their minds again. You know the Virginian courts decided that carrying concealed weapons was a good thing, and like Texas, they decided to take the consequensces for whatever happened. BUT what people don't know is that Virginia Tech went after a student for having a gun on campus, legally barring concealed weapons from the campus itself. Hence the whole sneaking of the firearms onto the campus. I'm actually kind of upset at the gun control lobbyists: Virginia's gun control laws are fine, they worked up to this point, and if the left did it's research, they'd see it.

All in all, the reporting done is a rehash of columbine, columbine was Wako with kids, and wako was the origin of all this. What I'm saying isn't that these things shouldn't be covered, but they should be covered in a totally different, more sensitive way: the persuit of the "facts" has forced the human aspect of the tragedy to the back seat.

That annoys me.