Navigating Tragedy in the Age of Too Much Media

I’ve used this blog as a platform for sorting out my feelings about tragic events before, and I hate the fact that I have the opportunity to do that again so soon.

This was a difficult day for anyone who heard the news of the senseless murder of 20 children and 6 adults at a Newtown, CT school. That’s not something that anyone can conceive of, let alone process when faced with such a reality. For those directly affected by the day’s events, the word “horrific” probably doesn’t even come close to describing the disbelief, inconsolable pain and sense of loss reverberating through a community that previously reported only one homicide in the last 10 years. It’s unimaginable.

Many far more eloquent than I will find the right words to inscribe this event into one of the darkest corners of our nation’s history. I’ll leave that responsibility in more capable hands.

My reaction consisted mainly of praying for everyone involved, consoling myself with the timeless wisdom of Fred Rogers and attempting to follow the latest news updates via Twitter, news websites and live streams from cable news channels.

Here’s the problem: the mainstream media (by and large) is seemingly incapable of providing reliable coverage of major news events. As both a trained journalist working in the communications field and a journalism instructor training tomorrow’s reporters in the effective use of multimedia and social media, this realization comes as a depressing professional blow, but I stand by the statement. The 24-hour news cycle combined with the omnipotent, relentless social media beast has turned every big news story into an increasingly cutthroat first-to-tweet competition among news organizations — without regard for ethical considerations, proper sourcing or substantiated truth.

This has been the case for a while, but perhaps the grisly subject matter of today’s news threw the media’s shallow, self-promoting weakness into sharper relief. We needed the media today, more than we usually do. The function of the press is to to provide facts, to tell people’s stories and to make sense of a seeming chaos of details in a clear, trustworthy and understandable form. That’s why I became a journalist. I think that’s always important. I think that in a situation like today, it’s vital.

I would argue that this was not a breaking news story. By the time the journalists showed up, the deed was done and the action was over. Investigators — fellow human beings who were no doubt just as shaken by this incident as anyone else — were doing their methodical work. But their pace wasn’t fast enough, so media outlets began to peddle unsubstantiated hearsay on the air, online and on Twitter: getting the identity of the shooter wrong, linking to mistaken identity social media accounts, reporting the wrong identity of the victim at the shooter’s home, inventing the fact that the shooter’s mother worked at the school, and more (don’t even get me started on the decision to interview third graders who had just been rushed out of their classrooms by police officers). With every passing moment, there seemed to be a changing bit of crucial information or another retracted tweet. By the evening, I was discussing the events with friends who still believed some of the media-promoted lies from earlier in the day because they hadn’t heard the updates and retractions.

Call me an idealist, but there’s something radically wrong with a scenario in which the supposedly unbiased media is rushing to judgment on key facts of a news story while the entire nation is simultaneously glued to and at the mercy of the media’s coverage. Social media–for all its positive potential–has turned the media world into a lawless Wild West without consequences. A news outlet can indict the first result from a Facebook search for a heinous crime and “undo” the damage by deleting a tweet or retracting it in 140 barely apologetic characters. Too bad it’s impossible to ever really put the toothpaste back into the tube. Unfortunately the media landscape is covered in accidental toothpaste these days, and I’m at a loss for how to brush it away when it’s becoming the accepted rule rather than the appalling exception.

Perhaps I’m taking my helpless frustration at the situation out on the media a little bit, but we desperately need a higher standard. I truly hope that the general public — and especially young journalists and journalism students — are as disgusted by these media gaffes as I am and unwilling to let this continue. Difficult as it is, journalists have a commitment to uphold to the public and a responsibility to seek accuracy above all else. It doesn’t matter if the facts are being printed, posted, or tweeted.

In the heat of battle, mistakes happen. I get that. But the battle is self-imposed by competitive news organizations and the “mistakes” are calculated reporting risks designed to garner more clicks or to earn some sort of perceived recognition as the first to break the latest detail. I don’t think the public actually takes note of which news organization informed them of which facts, but I certainly hope they remember which ones misinformed them.

Be right, not first. And don’t report until you’re right. Lord knows we have much bigger things to deal with right now.