Video from a student’s cellphone became the visual point of reference for a national tragedy at Virginia Tech Monday, broadcast on CNN repeatedly and posted on the network’s website. In a grim sign of the times, 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 mid-morning. The video had passed “900,000 hits” at midday.
“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.”
They wouldn’t want anyone to miss the sound of lives being taken, or to give the dead a moment of quiet respect. No, the national cable TV machinery seized on the grim bit of eyewitness testimony and the hour-by-hour exploitation of death took over.
When witnesses saw a bloody victim being removed from the scene, the sight was recounted endlessly as a prime bit of gruesome evidence trotted before the audience.
The fact that this was “like a college Columbine,” in the words of one student, did nothing to ensure that the media would behave more responsibly this time.,P.
As at Columbine, interviews with students were rushed onto the air, sometimes including hearsay, sometimes containing emotional and contradictory statements. Reports of a handgun, then a semi-automatic or automatic weapon, and varying numbers of dead (21 at first, 22, 28, 32…) gave the audience a ghastly show of unfiltered information in its raw state.
The networks scrambled to the scene. CBS’ Katie Couric and NBC’s Brian Williams each planned to broadcast Monday’s evening newscast from Virginia Tech; ABC’s “Nightline” planned a full hour from Blacksburg Monday night. ABC’s Charles Gibson planned to anchor from Virginia Tech on Tuesday. Couric planned a full hour in place of “48 Hours” on Tuesday.
Footage and information from Virginia TV affiliates filled in gaps from area hospitals but couldn’t compare with the omnipresent student video, which showed less than it revealed aurally.
On Fox News Channel, campus security specialists weighed in and a reporter asked a student to theorize as to the gunman’s motive. The engineering student had no answer, but angrily questioned the “gap in the timeline” between the first shot and the later fatalities.