It's sad that it takes a tragedy to awaken our senses, to compel us to start important discussions. But it's even sadder when such a tragedy fails to awaken us at all. Of course, the shootings at Virginia Tech certainly highlighted significant problems with America's confused system of gun control—or lack thereof—and reignited debate about one of America's oldest rights. It also showed flaws in the mental health system at some of the country's universities, and with the way that hospitals and police communicate about potentially dangerous individuals. And it pointed to, as if on cue, the powerful influence of Hollywood and video games, the dangerous blurring of violent art and reality in the hands of a student whose own gruesome fiction writing foretold his plans.
At least that's what the news told us. In fact, what the media told us and didn't tell us about this massacre might be the deeper problem. The press's early misfiring (pardon the expression) about the shooter's identity—the Chicago Sun-Times and other outlets labeled him Chinese to the ire of many here—was only the auspicious beginning of the media frenzy that was to follow. Dutifully, America's 24-hour television news channels (CNN, Fox, MSNBC) stepped in fast, and for the next week paid attention to almost nothing else. And yet, something about that attention seemed inadequate, counterproductive even, to explain anything about what happened that day in Virginia.
The facts, few but grim (33 victims, the deadliest mass shooting in American history), and the imagery and language (police cars, helicopter shots, distraught students and talk of "a loner," "coping," etc) were part of what seems to be a now-familiar TV journalism template. In the contemporary American consciousness, "SCHOOL SHOOTING" has become practically an American fixture, a phrase we have grown accustomed to seeing about once a year on the bottom of the CNN screen, in serious red or black lettering with an animated target hovering in the background, as if we need a reminder of the severity of the situation, or of some immanent danger that remains. Four days after the incident, CNN's ticker still told me that the shooting was "Breaking News."
The accompanying commentary—in this case, the chatter of a news anchor filling airtime over idle video footage, or a repetitious talking-head debate on gun control and school safety—with the addition of new journalistic props, like students' amateur video, photos, blogs, and social networking comments, all seems intended, I feel, to satisfy the audience's questions: How? Why? More often though, all this news spectacle appeals to is a simpler need: the public's "need to know," and the morbid curiosity, voyeurism and hunger for sensation that comes with it.
Nothing wrong with that—as the popularity of youtube.com can attest, we all like to watch reality this way sometimes. Yet, one suspects, the more we watch, the less we can see. That is, the more we sink ourselves into some oblivion of information and images, the harder it becomes to confront and understand the reality underneath. As critic Susan Sontag reminded us in one of her last essays, this idea is not an offspring of our recent 24-hour news cycles: in 1800, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, poet William Wordsworth denounced the dulling of sensibility produced by "the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies." This overstimulation acts "to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind" and "reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor." I am reminded of how, following the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, a friend of mine recoiled at my description of that killing. I had called the events "cliché"—horrible word choice to be sure, but after the "spate" of school shootings that preceded Columbine in the media—that's how a school shooting felt: something to be expected.
And yet, there is nothing to be expected at all about a person opening blind fire upon classrooms of students and teachers. But expectation, familiarity, and a kind of fatigue, is one of the few outcomes of the media frenzies that follow (the "circus" of reporters grew so big that a week later Virginia Tech students issued a statement begging the media to go home). The valiant attempt to explain what happened and even to comfort audiences—two journalistic responsibilities that were not completely forgotten by the news coverage—ultimately ended in little more than sensationalism. And worse: while the video, photos and hate letters sent to NBC News by the evidently TV-savvy killer shed some light on his mental state, broadcasting large parts of his "media kit" only hurt the victims and fueled concerns that his menacing image would inspire copycat acts.
Of course, I'm not suggesting that such an event, and even the killer's messages, should not have been reported extensively. Rather, I'm pointing to the effect of which Wordsworth wrote, the way that a saturation of shocking data can dull our senses. Consider America's fatigue with the violence in war-torn places like Sudan, Afghanistan or Iraq. On the day thirty-three students were killed at Virginia Tech, sectarian violence killed two hundred people in Iraq, including the dean of the college of Political Science at Mosul University and a professor from the school's Faculty of Arts. In January and February, 110 students, faculty and staff were killed by suicide bombings at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University.
This I did not learn from CNN. The networks' incessant coverage of the shooting excluded practically all other news of the day. And even if there had been no massacre in Virginia, Iraqi violence would likely have been given little attention anyway, given the public's fatigue of that kind of coverage. On one hand, American networks like CNN ought to be paying more attention to Iraq; on another, TV news' steady stream of sensation, meant to keep us from switching the channel, might help dull our ability to think, or even to care.
I don't mean to suggest that the media should hold back on its imagery in an attempt to return us to some imaginary state of heightened sensitivity: ultimately, real-life violence isn't going anywhere. But just as there is a difference between watching and seeing, between consuming data and understanding it, there is a difference between journalism's "facts" and "the truth." The former can be shaped into an intense news segment, with a tone evocative of the Hollywood movies that some have blamed for violence. But the latter, the truth, is much harder to convey. One truth for instance, neglected in the media's fear-laden coverage of the Virginia shooting, is that violence among youth in America is much more common out of schools than in them.
Of course, it is the sanctity of a school that makes such a shooting so shocking, so apparently worthy of heavy media coverage. But the "shock" of the incident overshadows another crucial truth, one that Americans and people around the world often forget: no amount of amateur video, no amount of interviews with stunned students, or even stern messages about gun control by political talking heads, is going to help us understand what happened or prevent this from happening in the future. That's the job of citizens, politicians and even, one hopes, journalists, who can discuss, ask questions, and engage others in conversation—about topics like social isolation, violence, guns, and the media itself. Because thinking and talking about reality is much better than watching it on TV.
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