Sunday, April 29, 2007
Opinion
The Columbine rule
By the time you read this...
Media on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, three days after the United States’ deadliest school shooting claimed the lives of 32 students.
CREDIT: Manny Garcia/AFP/Getty Images
By Eric Von Haessler
By the time you read this, I will just be tuning back into the 24-hour television news cycle. I created “the Columbine rule” somewhere in the midst of the wall-to-wall coverage of that human tragedy years ago and I’ve stuck to it since. The Columbine rule states that when a horrific event of monumental proportions happens, all television news is to be switched off and avoided for a minimum of 10 days.
Avoiding TV coverage would be a difficult challenge for most everyone. But in my house, where 24-hour news prattles on in the background like audio wallpaper, the absence of news alerts, updates and, the holy of holies, breaking news creates a palpable silence.
As is the case for any respectable news junkie, the world spills out of televisions all over my house. CNN downstairs, FOX News in my office and MSNBC in the laundry room (or some other vestibule fitting of its status). They all serve to keep me from being the last person to hear about all those things that other people are talking about. This sort of frantic news gathering and delivery suits my constitution just fine until a story like the Virginia Tech massacre breaks and—immediately, without hesitation—the sets are either switched off or over to those channels that play classic movies all day long.
It is enough to simply try and digest the facts in the wake of such a mindless rampage. The spectacle of TV news reporters descending like vultures upon a stunned community in a mad dash to get the most aggrieved witnesses before cameras as soon as possible is something I can do without. Once the news trucks arrive, the actual news is over and the “show” begins.
Television news is never a fly on the wall, happy to simply report events as they happen. Instead, each network assumes a personal narrative they feel will best sell the story and their producers set out in search of the community residents and character actors that will help them create compelling programming.
The angles and story lines aren’t all that different from network to network. They usually follow a chronological template of shock, horror, press conferences, tears, community anguish, friends of the victims, friends of the perpetrator, community anger, pundits declaring it the fault of this or that and, eventually, the emergence of hope as the community rallies together toward resolution. Bound by these narrative parameters, news shows are set apart only by their degree of exploitation.
Because the event in question was over before the first camera was mounted, the 24-hour television drama must be wrung out of the folks affected by the event, and not the event itself. The more arrogant news personalities will insist that we can use it as a “teaching moment,” where the entire nation can sort through it, grieve and maybe learn a lesson or two. This is hubris at best and self-serving, ratings bait at worst.
The sad truth is that there is no lesson to be learned from Cho Seung-Hui’s deadly massacre of innocents on the Virginia Tech campus. It will never be possible to stop a rogue individual, deep in the throes of mental illness, from lashing out at a society that they’ve decided is oppressing them.
All we can glean from events like this is acceptance. Just as when we lose loved ones prematurely, rest only comes when we accept the fact that life is sprinkled with both beauty and tragedy. There is no rhyme or reason to why so many innocents were sacrificed to the world view of one disturbed student, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.
The kind of “teaching moment” that brings about that realization usually happens upon reflection in a darkened and silent room. It never comes courtesy of a network anchor talking to the friend of a friend of a victim.
Eric Von Haessler, formerly of the Regular Guys radio show, is the online editor of www.sundaypaper.com.