Editor's Note 10/5/10

Story by Jacob Zlomke 

| Published Oct 5, 2010

We’re all well aware of the school shooting at the University of Texas last week. It was a huge deal, according to the media. Colton Tooley shot up the campus and killed himself in the library. According to an Los Angeles Times article on the event, “campus was locked down for hours.” Did you read that? Hours. As in more than one. The Austin campus was locked down for at least two hours.That’s big.
Other than that, though, the roughly 300 word piece didn’t have much to say. What about the psyche of a man so demented to dress up in a suit and ski-mask and terrorize a college campus with an AK-47 assault rifle, ultimately ending in the taking of his own life? What about all the students that were scared for their lives and are now quite probably traumatized by the event?
How about the Creighton University medical center shooting, also last week? Two cops were injured when Jeff Layten walked into the hospital armed, allegedly looking for his wife. He was shot by the police officers, critically wounded and died later because of the wounds. Google search for “Creighton shooter” yields a few local TV and radio station reports. Again, a deranged man and no kind of profile piece on the attacker, the victims or those that witnessed the accident. This one apparently warranted 200 words.
Because evidently you have to kill other people to make the news, right Seung-Hui Cho?
The 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech where Cho killed 32 people and himself got mass media coverage. The nation was in a frenzy. Publications dedicated 2,000 word pieces to Cho. To the victims that died. To the victims whose lives were drastically changed by the events.
Yes, 33 in all were killed as opposed to one each at Texas and Creighton, but one man deranged enough to terrorize a hospital or college campus, and in the Texas incident, kill himself at the end is a tragedy as well.
However, it seems the media as a whole is placing more value on the life of the victim than the life of the perpetrator, and more value on those traumatized when victim deaths are involved than those traumatized when victim deaths are not involved.
Texas students now go to a school that has two major gunmen events — recall, if you will, Charles Whitman’s 1966 killing of 16 people. Even though no one died, the most recent Texas shooting is not something Texas students can take in stride.
That same LA Times piece had this to say about the affect on students: “‘I was running for my life... I was so nervous,’” from student Andrew McWaters. Poor McWaters. Thank you media, for giving us such insight into the psychological trials these students that were indeed fearing for their own lives must have been going through. McWaters was nervous. Those Texas kids must handle tragedies a lot better than the Virginia Tech kids, because the victims and bystanders of that tragedy warranted about 400 words each on the MSNBC Web site.
My point here is that when it comes to events like this, the news media is irresponsible. They deem any one Virginia Tech victim more important than Tooley, and any victim that didn’t die at Virginia Tech more important than any victim that didn’t die at Texas. What if Tooley had fired a stray bullet into another student and that person died? Then what kind of media coverage would it be getting? I’m not trying to tell publications and TV networks how to do their own job, but I am saying that one life is not worth more than another — and that’s how the media has been behaving.