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In Praise of Insensitive ReportersWe'd hate them even more if they didn't overcover the VT story.

By Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, April 17, 2007, at 6:43 PM ET
Cho Seung-Hui

Everybody is too busy right now consuming the Virginia Tech slaughter coverage to accuse the press of going overboard. But come tomorrow, those accusations will gather speed, and damnation will be heaved at specific journalists and media organizations for their excesses. Stories, interviews, headlines, opinion columns, and even anchor chatter will be judged as cruel and intrusive.

How far is too far? The gold standard for journalistic insensitivity was established in the 1960s by an unnamed British TV reporter who was trawling for news at a Congo airport. According to foreign correspondent Edward Behr's 1978 memoir, the Brit walked through the crowd of terrified Belgian colonials who were evacuating, and shouted, "Anyone here been raped and speaks English?"

Cold. Very cold. Yet yesterday and continuing into today, reporters from around the country—make that around the world—are posing a slightly more polite version of the Brit's question to the friends and family of Virginia Tech students.

If you don't like the way journalists tromp on raw feelings of the injured and the grieving to get the big story, understand that journalists don't like it, either. The public's conception of reporters as exploitation artists, eager to violate any moral code in pursuit of a story, has been stoked from the beginning by reporters themselves. They've routinely resorted to fiction to confess their profession's transgressions and those of their colleagues (The Front Page, Scoop, Citizen Kane, Absence of Malice, The Bonfire of the Vanities, et al.).

Yet journalists are more likely to whimper about the traumas done to their souls by all that they've witnessed—butchered corpses, abused children, burn victims—than to contemplate the ethics of how they got the stories behind those horrors.

There may be no tougher assignment in journalism than knocking on the door of a mother who has lost her young daughter to a killer and asking, "How do you feel?" Playing the news ghoul is made easier by numbing yourself to the anguish of the real victims with self-disgust. Another way journalists numb themselves is to slip the veil of compassion over their newsgathering practices. Today, the Hotline spotted this craven dodge in online postings to Facebook by ABC and NBC. Both networks extend their sympathies to everyone at Virginia Tech affected by the killing, but add, hey, if you knew Cho Seung-Hui, "we have anchors and producers on campus that would love to meet with you" (ABC), and "We have producers and camera crews nearby ready to talk to anyone who can supply information about him and his movements leading up to the tragedy" (NBC).

A commuter jet falls out of the sky in Indiana, killing 32 people. It's a big story, but reporters don't fan out across the land to collect the sorrows of the surviving families. The topic doesn't fill the entire news hole. But if a student slays 32 young innocents, the press goes into overtime. Why should only the latter calamity rise to the level of a national obsession?

Because not all random, tragic deaths are equally horrifying. We handle accidental deaths by blaming fate, and then eventually make our peace. But murders committed at random discompose us at a primal level. They rob us of the false sense of security we use each night to tuck our children in to sleep. The Virginia Tech shootings also marked a new American death record, a detail that many outlets keep repeating to rationalize the news torrent they're producing. Add to all of the above the fact that the lives stolen were still green, that none of the promise nurtured by loving parents can ever be fulfilled, and you've got immeasurable sorrow. And immeasurable sorrow breeds immeasurable interest—not just from journalists, but from news consumers as well.

There's a thin line between responsible journalism and outrageous sensationalism, and bloodfests like the one in Blacksburg* tend to erase it. If the networks weren't pinging Facebook for leads, if the New York Times weren't compiling a "Portraits of Grief" for the Blacksburg kids right now—as I bet they are—and if the story came to a close tonight on Anderson Cooper's show, readers and viewers would riot. As reporters intrude into the lives of the grieving to mine the story, they should be guided more by a sense of etiquette than ethics. If they don't risk going too far, they'll never go far enough.

******

Thanks to Mark Feldstein, John Dickerson, Stephen Bates, Timothy Noah, and Josh Levin for their insights. Last line in the column adapted from a quip by Michael Kinsley. I don't really want to hear from you at . (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

Correction, April 17, 2007: This story originally misidentified Blacksburg as Blackburn. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
Photograph of a Virginia Tech student on Slate's home page by Ted Richardson/Raleigh News & Observer/MCT.
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Remarks from the Fray:

In the end, Shafer's only real point in support of intrusive, horror-show journalism is that journalists think the public wants it. Why does the public want it, and should the public be entitled to it? Well, Shafer doesn't try to answer those questions. This is evident from his closing line: "If they don't risk going too far, they'll never go far enough." Far enough for what? Shafer doesn't say.

I appreciate Shafer's good faith in digging into this question, and I recognize that these experiences are hard on reporters too. But justifying these activities simply by saying "the public wants it" is just another way of saying "it's good business." We don't accept ambulance-chasing from lawyers; it's not at all clear why we should accept it from journalists.

--Tom_Tildrum

(To reply, click here.)

While the purpose of the Constitutional protection of journalist is not to allow them to go to the extremes of which you write, it is nonetheless a by-product of such protection and freedom. So too, the rights of individuals to purchases guns with relative ease and the right to privacy – even if a certain individuals should never have the killing power of a gun in their hands – results in incidents like that at Virginia Tech or Columbine or even a family member at the wrong place at the wrong time in a no-news holdup.

Terrorism only works if society is free to feel the terror. While we all know of the cost of freedom in the death of our sons and daughters who have fought to maintain it, another cost is the abuse we suffer when freedom is exercised in a way no rational person would want.

Freedom is not free.

--scout29c

(To reply, click here.)

How many other news outlets and organizations will deliver a similar story in the days or weeks to come, chastising themselves and questioning if they went to far with their coverage?

In the aftermath of 9/11, network news anchors did the same thing. When they had run the story into the ground, they started talking about how the news media had driven the story into the ground. […]

Self-admonishment is just another vehicle with which newspeople can continue to take the story one step further. I work in news promotion and nothing can make you feel more of a whore than having to create the promotions and gaudy, morbid graphics for these excessive news pieces.

--Super8er

(To reply, click here.)

It's not so much the fact that journalists might intrude into horrible personal circumstances that bothers me, it's that they rarely add anything to our knowledge as a result of those intrusions. What can we really learn by putting a microphone in the face of a mother whose son has just been butchered, or zooming in on the expression of a man who has just lost his entire family in a house fire? If we could gain anything by journalists' heartless abrasiveness it could be justified.

Instead, when they've run out of the prurient content, they might interview an expert on grief counseling as "filler," or talk to an FBI mass murder profiler as an add-on. God forbid they talk to a philosopher or religious person to examine the spiritual life of a mass murderer. But these are things which are of far greater value than the "if it bleeds it leads" stuff.

--EarlyBird

(To reply, click here.)

I [once] agreed to be on TV to promote the use of AEDs in schools two years after my son died because he didn't have access to one. The reporter interviewed me at home, and I was calm as I tried to explain how AEDs worked and why they were important. However, the reporter was more interested in hearing about my son, and of course I was glad to talk about him as well. I kept talking about him and looking at memorabilia until finally I broke down and said "That's enough." She led her story that night with my teary-eyed description.

--lonestarslp

(To reply, click here.)

(4/23)

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