News Media Mystifies Virginia Tech Massacre

The front cover of the Albuquerque Journal on Tuesday, April 17, had a one-word headline: Why?

The newspaper was allegedly echoing the question that Americans, and indeed those all around the world, were supposedly asking: Why did Seung-Hui Cho massacre 32 people at Virginia Tech?

Inside the paper, columnist Jim Belshaw wrote a piece titled, "Everyone Asks, 'Why?'" in which he asserted that everyone could not understand the killings. Clearly, even if not every American was baffled by the killings, journalists and columnists assumed they were.

But is it really true that millions of Americans are puzzled by the Virginia Tech killing? That how this could have happened is truly beyond their comprehension?

Really? Is everyone asking Why?

I wouldn't presume to speak for everyone, but I can honestly say that since the tragedy, not a single person I talked to has asked me or anyone in my presence why the Virginia Tech killings happened. Not one. They were curious about the killer, about his past, but none were fretting over the Why? question that reporters seem to see everywhere.

The Why? question seems more like a journalistic invention, a facile assumption made by reporters and pundits about what Americans are thinking without really asking them.

As I wrote in Media Mythmakers, I saw something very similar in the wake of the September 11 attacks, when the conventional wisdom espoused by the news media was that Americans had been changed forever. Yet only weeks later, 90% of Americans who were polled said that their lives had never really changed, or had already returned to normal. The news media had assumed, wrongly, that all Americans were changed forever. The news media now assumes--also wrongly, I believe--that everyone is asking Why?

It's easy to say that everyone is asking Why? It's easy to say that America is in mourning.

In fact, I'd guess most people pretty much know why this and other similar tragedies occurred: bad things happen. Every now and then, some nut will shoot up a school or blow up a building. Innocent people will die. Life is not fair.

And as for the idea that the entire country is in mourning, this is yet another journalist’s fiction. Many Americans, in fact, have spent the last week not mourning but calling in hoaxes and copycat threats.

Yes, I and many other people are saddened by the killings, but we are not in mourning. We see the news, shake our heads, and go on with the matters of the day. (In fact, I got the following message in e-mail from a friend of mine when I asked about the shooting: "Yes, as college student with absolutely no affiliation with Virginia Tech, I am overwhelmingly distraught over the shootings of people I don't know, at a place I've never been, by a person I never heard of before Monday afternoon.")

I suspect that many, if not most, Americans feel this way. They won't come out and say it out of respect, but that's the bottom line. It's not a matter of being callous, it's a matter of having perspective, and not trying to pick apart every tragedy searching for some existential answer to the problem of evil. I have written to my elected officials demanding to know what they are doing about stopping the genocide in Darfur, but I cannot weep for everyone who has died there, at Columbine, on September 11, in the Sago mine, or at Virginia Tech. Even if I could, I don't think it would be healthy.

Another problem with the Why? question is that it focuses on the bad things in life, the negative. For the most part, people don't ask why good things happen. They don't ask why a man threw himself on top of a stranger who fell into the path of an oncoming subway last year. We don't ask why the hurricane season wasn't nearly as bad as predicted.

This mystification of coherent events is baffling. Why did Cho kill people? The answer is pretty clear: He was a violent, mentally ill man who had access to a gun. Where's the big mystery? For those left unsatistifed with this basic truth, there's also Cho's stated anger at the rich and privileged, as he described in his suicide note and videotape mailed to NBC.

The real question is why these answers do not satisfy the public (or why journalists assume that these answers are unsatisfactory). I'm not suggesting that we not feel sorrow for the victims, nor that the tragedy be ignored. But in the wake of events like this, asking Why? is often pointless and unproductive. It does not help people grieve, it does not help us understand the event. Why ask why?

Past Essays

Back to top