The Review

Issue date: 4/24/07 Section: Editorial

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It is not often that a fellow journalist speaks out against his own kind. Sure, the constant struggle between television and print journalists remains, but it rarely ends up on a nightly broadcast or in a morning newspaper. This column is the exception to that rule.

As I watched the information pour across CNN on Monday about the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University shootings, I could not help but be repulsed by its coverage.

The first bit of coverage I watched was cell-phone video produced by non-CNN reporter and Tech graduate student Jamal Albarghouti. Not only did it seem that CNN failed to edit or even look at the video before throwing it on the air, it took the content from an extremely unreliable source. Albarghouti's video was not prefaced with a disclaimer and was certainly not suitable for any child watching the coverage.

Probably the most disappointing thing about the video was the number of times I was forced to see it on the broadcast. Because this was the only video evidence they had of the shootings, CNN chose to run the one- minute-and-seven-second video an infinite amount of times past noon, when I began watching the broadcast, until five in the afternoon when I could no longer take the shooting noise coming from the now-infamous video.

Another one of the more frustrating things I watched was the continued footage of any Tech student walking around campus. Whether the student knew about the shooting or the student was involved in any way with the shooter, CNN made it into exploitive footage to be exclusive on its channel.

One day after the shooting, just minutes before the Tech Convocation, CNN told me it was not going to show the entire event because the network did not want to impose on the privacy of Tech students.

It did not want to impose, but hey, setting a camera in the center of Tech's campus for 24 straight hours after the shooting and constantly filming random students that had nothing to do with the shooting as though they had been in Norris Hall is completely ethical.

Another problem with the 24-hour news network was the lack of fact checking that went on throughout the day.

As the "facts" came out, we learned of at least three different death tolls and numerous injury counts. From seven or eight to 21 or 22 and finally 31 or 33 deaths including the shooter, CNN simply could not get it right.

Continued...

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