After Virginia Tech: Media Death Toll Obsession

18 April, 2007. 369 words.

There are a lot of jumbled thoughts in my head after the Virginia Tech shooting on Monday. One of them is about the media’s grisly obsession with record-breaking death tolls.

I’ve noticed that the media seems unwilling to report any incident without attaching some kind of comparison to similar events in the past. For example, when discussing casualties in Iraq, reporters will invariably write or say something like, “100 people died in Iraq this week. That’s the most deaths in one week since last year.” Or something to that effect. With Scooter Libby, he was the “highest ranking official indicted since the Reagan administration.” You get the idea. It’s almost as though the bad news is not significant unless it’s worse than the previous bad news: If only 50 people die in a week, for example, the media considers those people underachievers.

This media obsession was on full display during the reporting of the Virginia Tech murders. When it was just one or two victims, the incident was just a footnote. It was, after all, “only” as bad as the last shooting at Virginia Tech last August. But when the death toll suddenly went up over 20, the sickeningly giddy comparisons started rolling in just as fast as the national media news trucks. Worst school shooting since Columbine. Worst school shooting since Texas 1966. Worst school shooting in US history. Worst single-perpetrator shooting of any kind in US history. It’s as if the media believes American viewers are so jaded and desensitized that they are incapable of grasping the magnitude of an event unless it’s compared against some other emotionally-charged event.

There are undoubtedly a lot of Americans like that, but I’m not one of them and I think it’s pretty insulting.

Brian Williams led off the NBC Nightly News For Dummies Monday Night with a line that went something like, “Not since 9/11 has there been a day that you remember where you were when you heard the news.” I remember where I was when I heard Brian Williams say that: On the couch, shaking my head in disbelief at the jaw-droppingly inane tabloid sensationalism that’s perverted modern journalism into little more than a bumbling Keystone Kops routine.

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