Alphabet Soup

If you were looking to build a case for the sheer pointlessness of 24-hour cable-news networks, Monday afternoon’s coverage of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech would’ve been a great place to start. It was excruciating to watch the afternoon cable-news coverage for much more than an hour, and not just because what happened in Blacksburg, Va., was so nightmarish. Any sane person would quickly feel the need to look away. But any sane person would also want answers, and within minutes of turning on CNN, MSNBC or Fox News, it was clear that no one had any. No one knew who the killer was. No one knew who the victims were. No one knew why the shootings happened. No one knew how the gunfire ended or why it went on so long. But that didn’t stop any of the three cable networks from repeating, ad nauseum, just how much they didn’t know. When that got old, they filled in the dead air with empty speculation, hearsay and unconfirmed half-truths. They all showed the same stock photos of parked ambulances and cops with giant guns. They brought in opportunistic security "experts" to pick apart the school administration’s crisis response before anyone knew how it had actually responded to the crisis. And their news anchors repeated, again and again, with a bizarre, bean-counting zeal, that this was the worst shooting spree in U.S. history, until the words lost all connection to actual lives lost and to the ruined families left behind. It was a nauseating paradox: the more you watched, the less you seemed to know.

If you shut off your television after five minutes, you were just as informed as if you’d stuck with it for another two hours: a terrible shooting had occurred that morning and at least 20 people, maybe as many as 30 or 35, were dead. Everything else wasn’t news, just rumor. And the speed and volume of the rumors actually served to obscure the situation, like a room slowly filling with smoke. The cable networks left viewers to parse for themselves what should be believed and what should be ignored—and, hold on a minute, isn’t that supposed to be their job? Most early "witnesses" on campus knew little more than we did. They’d heard gunshots, and so had we, thanks to some amateur cell-phone video. They’d heard that a lot of people had died, and so had we. The cable-news anchors were like strangers sitting on our couch. They were watching their TVs while we watched ours. We were all crowded around the same narrow pinhole, and so far there was nothing to see.

To be fair, incidents like the Virginia Tech shooting put channels like CNN and Fox News in an odd position: as long as they exist, they’ve got to air something. And it wasn’t a failure of journalism that no one turned up enlightening information within the first few hours of the shooting’s aftermath—it’s just the nature of a confusing, horrific incident. These things take time to sort out. And no TV producer who wants to be employed tomorrow is going to tell viewers to go do their laundry and check back in later when more information has come to light. In moments like these, there’s really no such thing as prudent journalism, because a prudent journalist would wait until there was something concrete to report. But because waiting isn’t an option, the cable-news channels seem to believe they’re making a choice between the lesser of two evils—bad journalism or no journalism—and for them, the choice is easy.

But we have another option: we can shut off the television. Anyone who switched off MSNBC or Fox News as soon as they learned the basic facts, and didn’t tune back in until the major network’s nightly-news broadcasts, were rewarded with thoughtful, cogent reporting complete with eyewitness accounts of what happened that morning in Norris Hall. In other words, actual news. ABC, NBC and CBS only had a few more hours of perspective, but it made all the difference. The identity and motive of the shooter were still unknown at 6:30 p.m. EST on Monday night, but by then, a detailed timeline of the morning’s horrors had begun to emerge. And the sober, dignified performances of the network-news anchors stood in marked contrast to the amateur-hour idiocy of the afternoon’s coverage. It was an object lesson in why the much-derided broadcast- news format is still so essential—maybe more essential than ever, if only as a way to cut through all the noise.

It was the difference between watching children, and then watching adults.Of course, not all the adults did their jobs equally well. "NBC Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams, reporting live from the campus in Blacksburg, began his broadcast with a melodramatic line about how "years from now, Americans will remember where they were when they heard the news of what happened here today." He might be right, but Williams has never been especially good at sentiment, and his broadcast rapidly improved once it got down to the business of reporting what actually transpired on campus. By this point, puzzled viewers needed some cold-eyed clarity, and NBC delivered. The network’s tick-tock—its narrative of events from the first shootings at about 7:15 a.m. to the bloodbath at Norris Hall two hours later—came right at the top of the broadcast and filled in every blank that, up to that point, could’ve been filled. (ABC’s "World News with Charles Gibson" also managed to restore some sense and gravitas to the Virginia Tech coverage, though Gibson was the only one of the three major anchors who didn’t report live from Blacksburg.)

By contrast, "The CBS Evening News," hosted by Katie Couric, picked up the blame-game thread from the cable-news channels and immediately pounced. Just over a minute into her opening remarks, Couric hinted at "many serious questions about the [university’s] response ... and whether much of the carnage could’ve been prevented." Three minutes elapsed before Couric offered any information about the suspected killer, including known details about his ethnicity, the weapons he used and the simple fact that he had almost certainly killed himself. She’s certainly right—there are indeed questions about the university’s handling of the crisis—but just nine hours after all the bloodshed, with the killer’s identity still a mystery, his motives still in doubt and dead bodies still lying where they fell, how could such finger-pointing questions be more pertinent than the basic facts of what actually happened?

Getting to what actually happened took CBS some time. Couric’s first interview subject was a random student who said that he heard gunshots on campus and that police told him several people were dead. Talk about unenlightening. Her second interview was with another set of bystanders, and she immediately pressed the accountability issue again. "You all are angry there wasn’t a lockdown," she said. (She didn’t ask, mind you. She told them, like a lawyer leading the witness. "It’s not so much anger as it is confusion," one of them replied.) Finally, in her third interview, she spoke with a student named Derrick O’Dell who was wounded at Norris Hall—he was shot through the arm—and who actually looked the killer right in the eye. She hunched down in her seat and fiddled with her fingers, looking softly at O’Dell while pointing out that it "must have been so terrifying." The exchange called to mind an old Stephen Colbert line. She wasn’t bringing us the news; she was feeling the news at us.

Williams and NBC landed the same interview with O’Dell, only they went to him first, right after their tick-tock of the morning’s events. Given that he was one of the few surviving victims and a rare eyewitness to the killer, interviewing him before anyone else should’ve been obvious. But on a day when confusion and misinformation clogged the airwaves for hours, let’s be thankful that at least one network had the good sense to stick to Journalism 101: just tell us what happened.