Virginia Tech Graduates - Media's Moral Hazard

A Reuters photographer watches families visiting the Drillfield Memorial. A constant media presence invaded every aspect of the graduation ceremonies.

Saturday, May 12 2007¹ marks graduation at Virginia Tech the end of the media stake-out of Blacksburg Virginia. Since the April 16 shootings in Ambler Johnston and Norris Halls every news organization from BBC to Reuters, AP and CNN have stalked the roads and sidewalks of Virginia Tech. For nearly a month, long lenses and harsh lights have tracked the students of this heart-heavy University through their grief, their sorrow, and their daily lives. In a mad rush for the latest scoop, the most shocking news-bite, and a somber moment captured on film, the mourning of a community - and indeed a nation - has been defiled, exploited, and paraded about like some tawdry scandal.

Thankfully, it is over - but Blacksburg and Virginia Tech now bare little love for the cameras and microphones of an inquiring press.

Students and residents alike have battled through streets lined with satellite trucks and media vans, dodged reporters, and ducked away form the staccato glare of flashbulbs. They have born their grief in full view of the world, have suffered beneath the scrutiny of an at once fervent and coldly distant media. And yet despite the intense focus of the spotlight, the vision of Virginia Tech wrought in the world perception is wholly incomplete, woefully inaccurate, and tragically simplistic.

On May 13, 2007 Virginia Tech's department of Political Science and International Affairs awarded nine post-humus degrees to its fallen students. Virginia Tech's largest ballroom was filled beyond capacity with friends and loved ones while hundreds more watched from an overflow location. As one, these thousands of at once celebrants and mourners stood and were silent as, one by one, the names of the fallen students were called and their families, friends, and (in some cases) fellow shooting victims came forward to claim the diplomas earned, but never received. As thousands stood in silence, as the faint chime of a single bell reverberated throughout the cavernous hall the constant click and whine of camera shutters broke the stillness.

Huddled along the wings of the ballroom, photographers and videographers shoved against the stoic imposition of the Virginia State Police - some the very same that had charged towards gunfire on April 16^th - for the perfect angle and the proper framing.

And for so little.

The ubiquitous media presence at Squires Student Center and and nearly every other university ceremony cast a pallor over the commencement proceedings. The bittersweet graduation of the class of 2007 was made far more difficult and painful by the unblinking eye of the media. Even amid the solemn trappings of a University still in mourning, the celebration of graduation shown through. Yet, for many, the unmistakable long lenses of news photographers from around the country checked that exuberance and dampened that joy.

All of this is the consequence of the 24-hour news cycle. The pervasiveness of cable, a rising hunger for more information, and the ability to meet that demand have given rise to a corporate media machine which is, in every sense, a slave to the market. Demand dictates fresh stories, new data, and personal perspectives packaged, polished, and delivered on four channels in stereo-surround sound twenty-four hours a day. News has become a marketplace of information and as such, has become governed by the properties of the market.

News has become efficient - astonishingly so. Throughout the first and second gulf wars both Iraqi and US intelligence often relied, not upon sophisticated intelligence networks, but upon the reporters between the battle-fronts. In media as in all markets, however, efficiency of the scale that can usurp the organs of government comes at a price. Markets create efficiency at all costs - indeed at any cost. Hungry for the next big story or the next major scoop, American media has abandoned the standards that were once its watchwords. Examples litter recent history: Dan Rather's involvement in the Bush AWOL story, the unquestioning rebroadcast of White House press-releases as independent journalism, and the Reuters photo-doctoring scandal.

The callousness and inhumanity shown Virginia Tech in recent weeks is simply the most recent failing of this system; and it is failing. The system has failed when a teacher who has lost nine students to a gunman is pulled aside by a camera crew and asked "how does this make you feel?" The system has failed when a wounded student requires a professorial escort to fend off a veritable herd of media for days on end. The system has failed when a public University must greet the parents of its fallen students on privately owned land under police guard to keep a media circus at bay.

Thankfully, it is over, at least for now. And when the next media feeding frenzy begins and another 24-hour news blitz sweeps the airwaves the citizens and students of Blacksburg Virginia will, perhaps, watch with a sense of sympathy and sadness for the lives and communities under the glaring lights and gleaming lenses.

1. Virginia Tech's graduation ceremony was spaced out over two days with a full-University ceremony on the 11^th and individual department ceremonies through the 12^th. Though graduation began on the 11^th the 12^th serves as a better closing date for the media circus surrounding the events of April 16.

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