Bad Day at Blacksburg Made Worse By the Media

In light of a tragedy where at least 31 persons were murdered on Virginia Tech’s campus, it is understandable that everyone is anxious to know what happened. Likewise, it is understandable that there’s an onslaught of reporters laying down a barrage of question to the school president and the chief of campus police.
Watching the earlier press conference, there seems to be a frenzy of questions regarding a lock down, almost to the point of being accusatory. However, how easy is it to lock down an open campus. President Steger reminded the group that the school has 26,000 students and 9,000 students on campus at any time. The difficulty in notifying every student to stay away or to stay put is daunting to say the least. The contrast between locking down an entire college campus versus locking down individual buildings , as would be the case with public schools, is not something that should be overlooked. After the fact, it is easy to point fingers to say, "why didn’t you do this", or "why didn’t you do that."
The questions continued, and the Chief responded as he should have, "W don’t have an answer to that right now." What else is the Chief supposed to do? A mere few hours after a pair of shootings, how can they be expected to know everything there is to know, no investigation needed. Isn’t that what we expect from a police agency, an investigation. Rarely do these tragedies lend themselves to instant analysis. Rarely is the whole story laid out for us. Furthermore, the Chief is under no obligation to tell the public everything just because a group of reporters let loose with a lot of questions.
A reporter’s jobs is to find out and report what happened. They have an opportunity to put together a bunch of questions, some of which are just simple speculation. None the less, we expect the authorities to have answers to everything asked, and we point an impatient finger at them when they don’t. Is this reasonable, or is it just a reflex reaction to a terrible tragedy. Watching MSNBC moments after the press conference, the anchor is misquoting the chief in what seemed to be an tawdry attempt to cast doubt on the competency of campus police to investigate what happened.
It is apparent that these days the media’s job is not to report what happened, but to point fingers before the dust has settled. He’s a novel idea, let’s find out what happened before we make accusations.