Virginia Tech vs. Delaware State: What The Press Chooses To Push

Browsing around through RSS feeds and Google News this morning, I ran across a disturbing bit of news. Apparently, for no evident reason, three Deleware State students were shot and killed execution style this past weekend. The linked report goes on to say that “police say the four friends were just listening to music outside Mt. Vernon School when they were apparently chosen by the killer or killers at random”. Facts are scant at this point, but initially it would seem that this was a random crime in every way. No motive, no planning. It’s a horrible story, but a simple one.

What’s almost equally disturbing to me is that there’s no mention of this story whatsoever in the mainstream press. None. I watch CNN for around 45 minutes as I get ready every morning and there wasn’t even a quip about this. Instead, there was a lot of repeated information about the Minneapolis bridge collapse that I had already heard on the same channel at least twice already. In addition to that, there was also a good three to four minutes covering Lindsay Lohan and all her escapades.

Disturbed by this, I checked CNN.com and MSNBC.com earlier.

MSNBC…

….nothing. Some international politics featured as the top story, mentions of Barry Bonds and Lohan.

CNN…

No mention of it here, either. But oh look, apparently Eddie Murpy is the father! Is Maury buying time on CNN now?

Sadly, there’s no mention of it on either homepage of two of the top news distributers. I was asking myself earlier this morning how could this be. There was a limitless amount of press on the similar story in Virginia Tech, so much to the point that VT students were practically begging the press to leave the campus days after the event happened. So why is the press hesitant to cover this similar story in Delaware State? You could go the way of the conspiracy theory and hypothesize that it doesn’t serve any particular agenda. The Virginia Tech killings were a premeditated event in which the killer had long stewing psychological problems and bought weapons far in advance. Either Tom Cruise and or Charlton Heston could jump on either bandwagon there and push supposed facts and figures. Or you could go more simple in theory and guess that the media had a “sexy” story that attracted attention. They could go to the VT campus and feature Brian Williams in a live shot that they could use in advertisements later, claiming they were “there on the scene”.

But no. The Delaware story isn’t “sexy”. It’s simple in the details. There’s nothing to report, nothing to push, nothing to add to an agenda. It’s a story that the networks have ultimately defined as not important as evident by the lack of attention it has gotten initially. It may later, but the ignorance of it as it has happened is truly the story here.