Good and bad journalism

Reporting on the shooting

The Good: In a story headlined, "That was the desk I chose to die under," David Maraniss and a team of 10 Washington Post reporters compiled a riveting minute by minute account of the Virginia Tech massacre that is at the pennacle of good news reporting. The information gathering was supurb; the writing crisp and at times eloquent:

"Life is mundane until it is not, and then the mundane can look serene," the story goes, summing up how the world changed Monday morning for those in Blacksburg, Virginia.

See Post article here.

The Bad: MSNBC's Chris Matthews, interviewing Karan Grewal, the killer's dormitory suite mate, chided the Virginia Tech student for not reporting to police Cho's "really weird" behavior of not talking to fellow students. Matthews said: "I’ve never heard of anybody like this in my life…he walked around without aspect, like a zombie, and you guys didn’t talk about him, you never told anybody about him…you never thought this was really weird . . . you never thought this was really weird, this guy was incommunicato with his suite mates?"

I guess the thought of someone not running off at the mouth is incomprehensible to a loud mouth like Matthews.

Then, apparently seeing that he was berating a victim, Matthews took a different tack, over-making the point that Virginia Tech authorities did not warn Grewal or other students about Cho's prior psychiatric evaluation. How can someone in Matthews' national network position be so ignorant of privacy laws (can you say "HIPPA"?) that are now common knowledge to the public? In addition, how can Matthews be so insensitive as to blame victims for what a crazed murderer did?

This is why cable "news" programs like his are junk.