Virginia Tech Graduates - Media's Moral Hazard

Saturday, May 12 2007 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.