Too Close to Home

I'm struck by how close to home the news is, yet how far away, remote and desensitized it is. Northern Illinois University is 45 minutes away from my home. My parents met each other there. Countless friends and acquaintances go there. My little sister talked about going there to get a teaching degree. I even checked out their journalism program back in the day. It's strange that with all the connections to that place, I'm not grieving, traumatized or upset. THAT bothers me more than anything because I feel like I should be. I'm disheartened that random act of violence - or intentional acts, whichever this one turns out to be - are showing up so frequently. I'm also disheartened by the way I see it covered.

I was in the newsroom most of the day today, sick, stressed, on deadline and completely unable to focus because I have to watch CNN's coverage of the "Campus Rampage." Again and again and again. The same headlines. The same photos. The same video. Occasionally something new. I can't even hear what they're saying, but I know it's probably repeated again and again and again. And I begin to wonder, who decided to call it a rampage? Did it occur to anyone the headline had such a strong connotation? The effect of CNN's coverage was numbing. It reminds me of something my mom used to make my sister do - repeat a mantra. My little sister used to think she was the boss; and whenever she tried to tell my mom what to do, my mom would turn to her and ask her to repeat the mantra: "You are the mother and I am the child." And after a while it began to work. My sister was able to changed her talking back habits. She altered her thinking after a while. You could argue it was voluntary brainwashing. What CNN was doing today was, I believe, unintended brainwashing. By repeating the same things over and over and over, the view had no time to sit and weigh the gravity of the situation. Its coverage told the viewer how to react. It told them it was a rampage. Not a tragedy, a rampage. A massacre. It told them. First it showed the aftermath - the ambulances and then the police cars - and then it told them: it was a rampage. CNN, while trying to capture the situation's gravity, stole it's greater impact from the viewers. It made the moral judgement for them, letting each viewer take it for what CNN said it was. There was no need, no time even, to stop, reflect, and come to the moral understanding on an individual basis.

This is why I believe I was so numb, and why so many others felt the same way. Cable television has to fill its time someway, somehow. And in its quest to fill time, it's short circuited the viewers' moral thinking. Truly understanding a tragedy takes time and thought. Who needs to put in time or thought when CNN does it for you? Especially when it's something that's so unpleasant to think about. And it's not a new topic, Virginia Tech anyone? Columbine? Kirkwood? We hear so often about guns, gun violence and mass shootings. The same thing happened with all of that coverage. The larger world is lost, and all we see are the shootings. The acts are anomalies, not something that happens everywhere or in all situations. Something caused it and that cause is often so muddled or hard to determine that it's reported and understood after the damage is done to the viewers, after it's banged over their heads that it's just another senseless killing. Over time, the effect adds up. Each new shooting, each new tragedy, it's played up until the feeling is no longer genuine. And it makes any lessons people might learn less poignant. People don't have to process or interpret the situation according to their morals and values or try to gain an understanding of the essential question in journalism: why?

Understanding the answer to that question is what makes the difference between being reactive and being proactive. The way CNN's coverage worked, it was conditioning people to respond reactively, by pulling on the strings of drama, danger, death. To find any proactive solution(s) to the problem of violence in schools, you have to look at the root causes and to the social fabric surrounding it. Taking away guns is not the answer. Tightening security is a reactive response. We have to look at this generation and ask, why? What's missing? What's causing this?