I’m a fan of words. I like adjectives and adverbs. I’m a fan of similes and metaphors. But one thing that bugs me is the overuse of words by the media specifically designed to scare or titulate. This is not some rant about the liberal media. I have no opinion on that worth sharing. This is about the media’s self congradulatory sense of hyperbole in the wake of the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech University yesterday.
The news media provided us with our first impressions of the scene. That’s their job. However, there were two words tossed around yesterday in many of the circulating stories that bugged me.
The first was “massacre.” Wikipedia describes the word thusly:
The word massacre has a number of meanings, but most commonly refers to individual events of deliberate and direct mass killing, especially of noncombatant civilians or without any reasonable means of defense, that would often qualify as war crimes or atrocities. Massacres in this sense do not typically apply to combatants except figuratively; the deliberate mass killing of prisoners of war, however, is often considered a massacre.
At the same time, the term “massacre” is used more widely to refer to individual, civil, or military mass killings on smaller scales, but having distinct political significance in shaping subsequent events, such as the Boston Massacre. Individual or small group acts of murder may also be described as massacres, as in the case of some school shootings.
Even Wikipedia understands that school shootings MAY be desribed as massacres and legitimately so, but it isn’t the FIRST meaning of the word and it isn’t even particularly appropriate in the case of V Tech, where the shooter killed people in multiple locations.
Whether they scrawled it across the bottom of the screen, used it in jumbo-sized banner headlines to open the story or just ran it as the lede in wire stories, this particular word was used to make us pay attention as if the fact that the worst school shooting in US history wasn’t enough on its own.
The second word I saw far too much yesterday is “bloodbath.” If massacre was an overstatement, bloodbath was massacre placed in a rocket, launched into space and exploded with the power of 20 nuclear bombs.
I’m sure that the families of these poor kids who were killed were thrilled to see such a salacious word used with such recklessness. I did a search of Google News for this word and found over 4400 references to the Virginia Tech shooting from this word alone. Many of the references were headlines run by newspapers about the shooting spree.
It is an understood truism of journalism that “if it bleeds, it ledes” meaning the more graphic the story, the more likely it is to be the front page banner headline. For decades, the news media have understood its audience and our penchant for sex and violence - the more graphic, the better. But, THIS is ridiculous. The following is the lede from the Associated Press story written by Sue Lindsey released yesterday:
A gunman massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history Monday, cutting down his victims in two attacks two hours apart before the university could grasp what was happening and warn students. The bloodbath ended with the gunman committing suicide, bringing the death toll to 33 and stamping the campus in the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains with unspeakable tragedy, perhaps forever.
“Stamping the campus in the pictureesque Blue Ridge Mountains with unspeakable tragedy, perhaps forever?” Are you freaking kidding me? Perhaps FOREVER? What is this, a news story or the trailer for a slasher film? In this first sentence of the story, we get a smattering of facts but mostly we get overly descriptive words that serve very little purpose and a two-word ending worthy of a spot on the back cover of a legal thriller, but not suitable for any self-respecting newspaper.
Massacre and bloodbath are words best reserved for heavy metal song lyrics or gothic horror novels. I understand the need to describe what happened because, after all, inquiring minds want to know. But, all the media outlets did yesterday was massacre journalistic standards.
I’ve got news for you, Jeff. Journalistic standards went out the window about 20 years ago, when news became entertainment. You have to dig for true journalism nowadays, and you aren’t going to find it on any of the networks or cable TV newschannels. Those outlets are strictly for mass consumption at a moderately low IQ level.
[...] I recently complained about the way the media “reported” the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mainly, I had a problem with their use of speculative language and opinion rather than fact to emphasize the story. [...]