Is the News Creating more Tragedy or is it just us?

The suicide note left by Robert Hawkins, the young man who killed eight innocent people before turning the gun on himself, started out with “Now I’ll be famous." At what cost doesn’t seem to have been a question in the demented youngster’s mind.

You all know enough about the horrendous killings at the Omaha shopping center. Perhaps every columnist and blogger with two index fingers pounding away has written something about this latest mass killing in our country. Another sick individual opened up on innocent Americans with an AK-47 and news outlets couldn’t get enough of it.

My concern is not with this story but the ramifications of the news outlets especially cable news spending hours and hours on this story and those that are similar in horror. My problem is they spend almost all of that time on the killer and little reporting on the victims. Of course the agenda driven pundits all make the news continuously. Pro gun and anti gun spokesman use the shooting as another chance to prove their points. The victims lose their identity as they are transformed collectively into a cause. A cause with no interest in whom they were save someone whose tragic death can prove the point of someone who is still alive.

The story of course deserves to be told. It is terrifying. It is reality. It is something that in this free society we have a right to know about in detail. The question is do we need this story almost fixated in a repetitive loop until it becomes ingrained in our minds and the minds of some of us who see the stories as a strange chance at hope. Do some see these tragedies as a way for them to shed the anger, frustration and feeling of ambiguity that often are traits of these mass killers through emulation?

To be sure the Omaha killings didn’t receive as much press as the Virginia Tech massacre that killed twenty-seven students and five teachers. Perhaps network and cable news has a scale of how many victims determines how many hours of coverage. In the Virginia Tech case, nothing else was on the news for an entire week and although again the story deserved to be told, did it deserve to be told 24 hours a day seven days a week. Every anchorman and woman ran for a plane so they could stand on the lawn and report first hand how horrendous this event was to so many people. In the Virginia Tech disaster, Seung-Hui Choj had his name and photos and his words reported for days. Days wherein family members were burying their children who had been at college working on fulfilling their dreams. Dreams that were destroyed in a moment by a man whose face never left the news back then. 

Did the news have to almost fully concentrate on the killer with only occasional blips into the lives of the victims? Did they have to carry the same news with nothing new to add over and over seemingly ad infinitum?

At Penn State University two students have been chastised for going to a Halloween party wearing Virginia Tech shirts covered with blood and fake bullet holes. The two students who find no need to apologize were trying to “one up" the previous year’s costumes. Last year some of their friends dressed up as Amish children who were killed in a school massacre the year before. How college age youngsters couldn’t see how tasteless their garb was proves the news is making some of us numb to tragedy. Or does it prove that there are far too many among us who don’t have the sensibility to know right from wrong.

Anyone with any age can tell me who Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are. We will all remember the names of the Columbine school killers. I ask you now to name two of the victims. Victims whose lives had hope and promise and worth destroyed in a moment by insane assassins.

Perhaps the news could do a special on all the victims of random violence someday. On one of those days when they don’t have another mass killing to drive into the ground that is. If anyone should ever become famous from a tragedy it should be these poor souls and not the killers.