Oddly intimate video from a student’s cellphone became the point of reference for Monday’s horrific national tragedy at Virginia Tech.
The campus-shooting video was broadcast on CNN repeatedly and posted on the network’s website. Anchors kept a running tally of how many hits the video was drawing.
“This has been seen 120,000 times on CNN.com,” an anchor noted midmorning. The video had passed 900,000 hits at midday and 1.8 million hits by evening.
If they had been reciting Nielsen ratings points, it would have been obscene.
“This is the closest we can get you video-wise,” a CNN anchor lamented. “I want you to watch the video and just listen to it very carefully.”
Muffled by wind, a lengthy series of popping sounds is the visceral take- away from the day’s coverage. The sensation was a curious mix of bland visual images over horrific sounds.
Later, still photos of bloody victims being removed from the scene were displayed endlessly, cable-TV news’ bread-and-butter shots.
The student who captured the sounds of carnage on his cellphone, Jamal Albarghouti, told CNN that “after a minute when I reached the area where I took the video from, I saw cops with guns and they were asking everyone to lay down or leave really quickly,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t another bomb threat. I knew it was something way more serious.”
The fact that this was “like a college Columbine,” in the words of one student, couldn’t ensure that the media would behave more responsibly this time.
As at Columbine, interviews with students were rushed onto the air, sometimes uncomfortably leaning on hearsay, sometimes containing emotional and contradictory statements. Reports of a handgun, then a semiautomatic or automatic weapon, and varying reports on the number of dead let audiences share the flow of unfiltered information in its raw state.
Again, as at Columbine, students reflexively described the carnage inside the classroom as “like a movie.” It was a reflection of how the pervasive violence of our pop culture provides a touchstone for the all-too-real violence of this latest school-shooting nightmare.
The Internet once again was a key player. CNN sought first-person reports, video and audio, and made it easy to submit material online with a form agreeing to terms of use.
The networks rushed to the scene. CBS’s Katie Couric and NBC’s Brian Williams each broadcast Monday’s evening newscast from Virginia Tech; ABC’s “Nightline” planned a full hour from Blacksburg, Va.
ABC’s Charles Gibson, wary of being detained by the Atlantic nor’easter, planned to travel to Virginia Tech today. CBS and ABC will devote additional prime-time hours to the tragedy today.
On Fox News Channel, a reporter asked an engineering student to theorize about the gunman’s motive.
The student had no answer but angrily questioned the “gap in the timeline” between the first shot and the later fatalities.
Those questions seemed destined to fuel future news cycles, at least through the Columbine anniversary on Friday.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
