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In my day job, I'm a journalism educator. When a horrific event such as Monday's massacre at Virginia Tech occurs, I'm looking for the lessons I can share with my students, and ways to make sure that I am modeling good professional practice for them.
With that in mind, I've been scouring the web and talking to colleagues about how this story should be covered, pitfalls to avoid, and lessons for the future. Here are some issues, advice, and story angles that I've come across so far:
1. Citizen journalists need to know basic safety rules for covering a dangerous story. As Mac Slocum notes in this discussion board post from the Online Journalism Review, the student who shot the camera phone video that's been playing on CNN and elsewhere ad infinitum ran toward the police, rather than taking cover. As the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma warns,
"Like police, firefighters, paramedics and others, journalists often arrive on the scene minutes after disaster strikes. Like other first responders, journalists should be mindful of their own safety."
2. Watch the headlines. This one comes from one of my students. She says she's been getting her news about the tragedy from Va Tech student newspaper website because the writing is "more sensitive, less sensational," adding:
I mean, just look at their title: "Heartache: 32 Fallen." Big difference from "Carnage on Campus," which I saw on The Trenton Times. That was disturbing -- when I hear carnage, I think of animals, not college students.
3. Be careful about the "myths" that can become part of the narrative in a story like this one. Dave Cullen, a Dart Center Fellow, covered the 1999 Columbine shootings, and found that "nearly everything we know about it is wrong."
According to Cullen, such widely-reported items that the shooters at Columbine were outcasts, that there was a shadowy "Trenchcoat Mafia," and that they were "targeting jocks," have more to do with reporters' preconceptions than with the facts. In fact, Cullen reported in this 2004 story on the fifth anniversary of that tragedy, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were acting out their deep psychiatric problems.
And then Cullen added this point, which really got me thinking:
An authoritative joint report by the Secret Service and Dept. of Education on school shooters found "there is no accurate or useful 'profile' of attackers." Yet the media will construct a profile this week anyway, and try to fit this attacker to it. We should resist, but also understand that there are some key characteristics, and there are several different profiles.
That had me wondering about the right way to use this widely-referenced study conducted by the New York Times in 2000. My concern is that journalists might take the fragmentary information that has been emerging about Cho Seung-Hui, the man identified as the shooter at Virginia Tech, pick out the details that match the NY Times study, and produce a pat analysis of Cho and his motives.
4.Be careful about the experts you choose to interview. The Dart Center Fellows raised this issue, but I had been thinking about it already, especially when I saw anti-videogame activist Jack Thompson bloviating on television about how the killer probably played a lot of Grand Theft Auto. The killer hadn't even been identified, so clearly Thompson was pushing his agenda. CNet published a condemnation and refutation of Thompson's remarks, but the real question is whether he was a legitimate source on the story in the first place. That brings up a corollary, below.
5.Try to stay independent of others' political, and personal agendas. Bernie at PopPolitics worries that the Jack Thompsons in this story will sway the debate away from the issue of guns in favor of scapegoating popular culture. After citing research that found that the news coverage of Columbine over-covered the games Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris played and under-covered how they got the arsenal they used to kill:
I certainly believe that popular culture has the power to influence both ideas and behavior. That's one way to express the premise of PopPolitics, in fact. But the use of popular culture in relationship to incidents of gun violence always seems like a distraction to me.
6. Campus safety issues have their own complexity Nearly every aspect of this story has a different twist because it happened on a college campus.
Take, for example, the debate over gun laws that has been rekindled by Monday's events, as BlogHer CE Melinda
