March 28, 2024

Broadcasting ‘the Shock, the Horror, the Outrage’ Live, Again and Again

“I think it’s OK to be a little pissed off,” Mr. Holt, of “NBC Nightly News,” said. “As a journalist, it’s not an editorial position to be upset or angry at mass murder, of people going about their day, shopping, getting cut down by a stranger. It’s OK to be upset about that.”

Gayle King, the “CBS This Morning” anchor, described an experience of feeling “like you’re kicked in the gut once again.”

“We almost know how this story is going to go,” she said, invoking a phrase she attributed to Steve Hartman, a CBS colleague: “We’re going to mourn, we’re going to pray, we’re going to repeat.”

“My worry is that we are getting desensitized,” she added. “I don’t want us to get desensitized to it.”

And some reporters have to endure it, and report on it, repeatedly in their own communities.

Chris Vanderveen, 47, was there as a young reporter in the aftermath of the Columbine shooting. He was there to report on the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting. And he had to lead a team of reporters during the Boulder shooting on Monday.

“When I was in journalism school I thought I’d be covering other things,” Mr. Vanderveen, the director of reporting at KUSA, Denver’s NBC affiliate, said in an interview.

He recalled painful lessons that he and his colleagues took from the Columbine shooting. Several reporters who covered that event developed close ties with people in the community, including parents of the victims. He said that helped them ask an important question: “What can we learn as journalists about not adding to the grief?”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/business/media/shootings-atlanta-boulder-media.html

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