I appreciate everybody’s great debate over Imus last week. Some smart comments and clever insights. Civility with an attitude. As repugnant as Imus’ remarks were, and as important as it is for us to be nice to each other, the fate of a shock jock seems pretty trivial right now, with the tragedy unfolding in Blacksburg, Va.
We have a reporter on the scene, and we’ll be up there reporting and trying to make sense of this rampage that left more than 30 people dead. It will change that campus forever. And it should. How it does is the unanswered question.
From a journalism standpoint, one of the things to watch for in the coming days is how new technology influences the coverage. Blogs. Cell videos. etc. If you think back to the London train bombings and the cell phone images that were part of the attacks. VT is a savvy, wired place with savvy, wired students, and they are going to be active participants in how this story gets covered and what gets covered.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
They absolutely played a huge role in coverage as it happened, Exhibit A being the cell phone video of the police moving toward teh building, with audible gunshots in the background. But now that events are no longer really unfolding, I think I prefer to get coverage of the backstory, as it develops, from recognized news sources.
Clearly there is a lot of emotion on campus right now, with parents and students upset over the university’s handling of the initial shootings, and I’m not sure anyone is capable of impartial, purely factual reporting in that context. That’s not a criticism; feeling is an important part of being human. But I think it pretty much makes unbiased reporting of why this happened impossible. The would-be reporters are just too close to the situation at hand.
My guess is that these cellphone videos and bloggers and facebooks writings are going to be a key part of the story going forward. The trick is going to be filtering it. My experience with the Web lends me to believe that everything looks more official when it’s online…
Oh, I agree they will be a primary resource. I just don’t believe the authors will be my definitive source for a thorough explanation of how this happened.
First person narratives always have value, absolutely. They arew the best way to feel what it was like. But they don’t always have all the information or even correct information, so they are definite viewpoints.
A number of initial writings for example offered up that the first victim was the shooter’s girlfriend and that the male with her was her new boyfriend. Then we learned he was an RA who came to her aide. Then we learned that maybe she didn’t have a relationship with the shooter.
I guess my main concern is that those students on-site may not purposely mislead, but they may be faster to publish without vetting sources thoroughly, trusting that what they are hearing is truth, not rumor. I’ve been in enough bad situations to learn the hands-on way that rumor runs rampant in high-stress situations, and often rumors take on lives of their own.
First hand accounts are nortoriously inaccurate as most trial lawyers will attest. I agree with Esbee. At best the first hand accounts add color to a situation but a good first rate reporter should be able to put things into an overall perspective that persons actually in the action can overlook or unintentionally misrepresent as “facts”.
Good point. Eyewitness accounts are sketchy, but they are the starting point for any investigation, journalistic or otherwise. That said, people believe what they want to believe. We saw that with Darryl Hunt, and time and time again in other events and incidents. Immediacy is important, but so is perspective and context. The problem is that immediacy almost always wins, and quite often ends up coloring the perspective and context.
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