The Morning of Living Dangerously

Another shooting in America. A crazy person with a gun. So what else is new?

Well, THIS was. It wasn’t Ferguson or Baltimore or a movie theater in Colorado. It was at a rural lake resort area in Central Virginia. A female TV reporter was interviewing a Chamber of Commerce representative about tourism, when shots were fired. The reporter and the videographer were killed, the Chamber lady was hurt – and it was all caught on live TV. The shooter got away, but according to the story, filmed (generic term) the whole thing while he was shooting and posted it on social media. Police closed in at a location in northern Virginia, and several hours later, he shot himself and eventually died.

Certainly this isn’t the first time journalists have been crime victims. But we have all these new issues. How dangerous is routine journalism, even for those doing the morning-coffee beat? Do they now have to carry guns, or have a security guard tag along? And how do other journalists cover this story? What do they show of the incident? How can they tell the story without giving the shooter what he wants: publicity? Will there be copycats? How do social media platforms keep a lid on graphic video?

Think of the challenge for news anchors all over the country, even the national stars. Most of them started off at small-market stations, likely interviewing Chamber officials at scenic locations for a morning show. How can they not be pierced to their core, as CNN’s Brooke Baldwin was, while reporting on this? It wasn’t all that long ago that she was a reporter at a TV station in Charlottesville, only a few hours’ drive from the shooting scene. You can’t quite blame her if she came close to “losing it” as she paid tribute to her fallen journalism colleagues. And what about the dead reporter’s own fiancé, who works at the Roanoke station as an anchor?

I was asked today how I felt about anchors “losing it” on the air in such situations. Well, Ms. Baldwin held it together, she didn’t lose it, but she was obviously deeply moved, as I’m sure all her viewers were. Some of us remember Walter Cronkite’s simple gesture of taking off his glasses and looking at the clock to tell us when President Kennedy died. That was how we knew he was moved. But anchors are human, too, and we know that part of them when we see it.

The fact is, general daily journalism isn’t safe. It’s not unlike being a cop. When you report to work in the morning, you don’t know for certain what you might be covering. An Easter egg hunt or a fire with a toxic waste cloud? An Apple store ribbon-cutting or an earthquake? A school spelling bee or an angry mob? The schedule can go to hell in an instant. You have to make judgments on the fly about where to put your equipment and vehicles, and yes, even your own body. That is, if you’re even given that chance.

And at some point, we are going to have to figure out how to cover these things – the balance between factual reporting – telling us what we need to know -- and drama, and how to keep from glorifying the wrong people. And, of course, how to keep crazy people away from guns. We don’t quite have those acts down yet.

Real Journalists

California Senator Dianne Feinstein may have put her foot in it up to the ankle as she introduced a bill that would shield journalists from criminal investigations related to their work. She made it clear that her measure was intended to protect real reporters, defined as those who draw a salary -- as opposed, I guess, to screwball bloggers with 10 or so faithful readers....er...like me.

There are lots of people out there who would love to be “real” reporters and be paid a decent salary, though such positions are fewer and farther between, as traditional news organizations that could actually pay salaries have drastically shrunk.

But I do know what DiFi is trying to say. Now that journalism has been democratized, anyone can have a platform, like the one I’m standing on right now. Journalism is one of those professions that many people think they can do without the least bit of training. They have eyes, ears, noses, and may be plugged farther in than the lame-stream media people in the big building down the street.

I used to work in a tourist town. Tourism involves promotion and marketing, and it seemed that at every public meeting, somebody would stand up and offer some whizbang magic bullet that would double the number of visitors to town overnight, and wondered why those in the business didn’t have the brains to see a solution that was right in front of them. It didn’t matter that the head of the convention and visitors bureau in the city had a degree or two in this subject, or that those running hotels actually had gone to a university to study their industry, and might even have a decade or three of experience in it.

Many parents are experts on how to educate children, and wonder why their kids’ credentialed teachers can’t do it and why they pay taxes to support overly compensated school district administrators, some of whom have doctoral degrees. Or your great aunt has a family recipe that has healed what’s ailing you a lot faster than the Harvard-educated doc with all those expensive pills.

But isn’t there something to be said for journalists whose passions have prodded them to get the training and put in the time practicing their craft, who’ve been around the block a few times, know when they’re being flim-flammed and where the bodies are buried, and have learned how to tell you the stories you need to see, hear, or read? They probably wouldn’t be in that profession over a period long enough to have acquired those skills unless someone paid them along the way.

So Senator, I hear what you’re saying. But maybe there’s a better way of saying it.