Lessons from Columbine

By Amy Brouillette, 4-17-07

I tuned into CNN yesterday morning to an eerily familiar scene: a breaking story of a deadly school shooting; the red ticker crawling across the bottom screen keeping tabs on the escalating body count (one, then 21, then 33).

For Coloradoans, Monday’s shooting at Virginia Tech that left 33 dead conjures disturbing memories of Columbine, the state’s most gruesome and notorious crime in recent history that occurred eight years ago this week. Monday’s events also brought an unwelcome reminder of the time-killing repetitiveness that is the 24-hour news cycle, where a strange mix of banter, speculation and sensationalism (especially covering fast-breaking stories) is the rule. Scrambling to piece together the story from few real facts, CNN resorted to the only thing it had: a video captured on cell phone by a student and sent to CNN’s I-Report, played ad nauseum, every few minutes or so, all day and night.

Wolf Blitzer’s Monday afternoon segment, for instance, opened with the video, and in the upper-right corner of the television screen, a running count of the number of shots being fired: “(bang) 21; (bang) 22; (bang) 23; (bang)…), in front of a rather graphic graphic (a pool of blood), and the tagline: “Massacre at Virginia Tech” in rudimentary, crooked block-letter font plastered below. By evening, celebrity anchors had descended on Blacksburg, Va., a small, rural, lower-middle-class town tucked between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains, (population, according to the 2005 census: 39,000; median income $25,000). Anderson Cooper, CNN’s reported $50 million man, blazed onto the scene, making official what was becoming so painfully obvious throughout the day: the Columbine-style media circus had indeed begun.

The national (and global) media feeding frenzy that besieged Littleton (a town of comparable size, 40,000, and twice as rich) in 1999 is a still-open wound among residents, many of whom harbor a bitter, or at least lingering, resentment toward the media they saw callously feeding off their community’s most private tragedy. That rift, as well as the behind-the-scenes friction between local and national media, is the subject of an award-winning documentary, Covering Columbine, produced in 2000 by University of Colorado School of Journalism and Mass Communication professor Meg Moritz. The film, which won the audience award for best documentary and the Freedom of Expression Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001, tracks the media stampede through small-town Colorado that left many residents (and local media) seething—and should be required viewing for reporters big and small dispatched to Blacksburg this week.

When the smoke cleared and the big networks and limousine journalists went home, local reporters were left with the fallout. The dust barely settled, in October 1999, CBS aired a video of the Columbine gunmen opening fire in the cafeteria against strong objections from parents; local stations chose not to show the footage. The Columbine media disaster indeed raised many of journalism’s long-standing, and often most contentious, ethnical debates: to run or not to run graphic images; how to report traumatic, indeed newsworthy events without exploiting, weighing public interest against a community’s right to grieve privately; and perhaps most relevant, how to report a story without becoming the story itself.

What is different today is the indomitable presence of the blogosphere, still in its infancy back in 1999. By Monday afternoon, the blogs had exploded with chatter on the day’s events (on Technorati, “Virginia Tech” was Monday’s most searched term). At least one local print outlet followed suit: Not waiting for Tuesday’s press run, The Roanoke Times turned to blog-style reporting, posting updates in present-tense voice every half hour or so all day Monday. Blogs, newspaper varieties and otherwise, may indeed fill the public’s need for up-to-minute information without resorting to crude sensationalism that so often rules television news.

For that medium, it seems, it is game-over: the television platform has long since devolved from news to infotainment, enlisting all the bells-and-whistles of a big-budget Hollywood movie trailer to satiate (or so the argument goes) a tech-savvy, information-hungry public; too often, it is dominated by the mindless banter of a Jerry Springer show that borders on the ridiculous. One example of just how lowbrow (and bizarre) it can get: on FOX late-night Monday, I caught a harried Geraldo, “live from Blacksburg,” interviewing via satellite former L.A. detective Mark Fuhrman (I kid you not), a FOX news regular, about the perils of violence in the community. Talk about the blind leading the blind. Serves me right, I suppose, for turning on FOX.