I have been following the news of America’s deadliest shooting ever at Virginia Tech with keen interest. My initial reaction was to follow the story like most people as it developed from one Television channel to the other and also on the web. I kept asking myself how this heinous act could have taken place and what sort of person the gunman was? Many of these questions have since been answered with latest insights into the shooting incident. I had my own challenge about what kind of system allows for students to carry guns on school campus.
My curiosity turned surprise as I watched the story unfold. What shocked me most was the way CNN worked tirelessly to find a scapegoat for the massacre on the Virginia Tech campus. These so called experienced reporters of CNN kept asking and insinuating that the school authorities and the police on campus had failed to protect the students and lecturers. I was shocked by the deliberate effort to set people up against each other. It smacks of mischief, definitely not what the ethics of the profession encourages. Fortunately, most students interviewed were indifferent to the ploy. What they were concerned with was the fate of their friends and colleagues, and how soon the healing process was going to start.
It’s worth noticing the nuance that has come into play in the coverage of this incident; the big market media pitched camp on the campus and devoting large chunk of their airtime to the coverage of this incident. I reckon this will go on for a while even with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee and more people dying in car bomb attacks in Iraq.
In the mist of the confusion, I noticed some good citizen journalism at work. I have read a lot about citizen journalism and how it’s aided by technology but have never really seen it happen like I did last Monday and thereafter. The first video/audio recording of the shooting incident came from the mobile phone of Jamal Albarghouti, a Palestinian student at Virginia Tech. Albarghouti shared the video and audio recording from his mobile phone with CNN‘s a citizen journalism blog I-Report. I have also seen on MSNBC, a second video footage taken by a Swedish exchange student on the campus. Most news websites also posted pictures taken by students of the university as the scene unfolded. In essence, what happened here were students reporting what they had witnessed. I am not sure how many of these students have already been interviewed by reporters but I did listen to many of them on all the networks I tuned into.
All the major news outlets also started quoting from student’s blogs before their own reporters arrived on the campus. Even though these students were not trained reporters, they told the stories, as they knew it, without any judgment or spin, it was first hand information. They spoke of their friends, as they knew them, feeding the big media with valuable information that they could share on their networks. The slant of the news was not decided by the media but by the students who even in response to leading questions from CNN, for example, kept their focus.
Media organizations like CNN and the BBC are counting themselves lucky to have received lots of information from students when the story broke. The BBC and CNN have for a while encouraged visitors to their site to upload pictures, video and audio clips of happenings in their communities. This is not for just breaking news as it happened in the case of Virginia Tech but for communities to participate in generating the content of what is news.
The motivation for capturing these pictures, sound or video is the fact that there is a place to off-load them to a larger audience and that’s the mainline media network.
The coverage of the Virginia Tech Incident will definitely serve as resource material for further research into citizen journalism. It’s also a powerful proof of the media teaming up with citizens to bring better coverage to a mass audience. Coverage of the next big news to break in the US and I believe elsewhere as well is going to be very exciting because we have gotten a bigger pool of potential correspondents- people on the streets.
