On CNN, the earliest on-scene pictures of the Virginia Tech shooting and words were provided by Jamal Albarghouti, a Virginia Tech graduate student from the West Bank. His cell phone pictures of police charging Norris Hall as shots rang out were broadcast and streamed over and over throughout the day. The Baltimore Sun reports.
“By dinnertime, CNN was featuring Albarghouti standing on campus, microphone in hand, reporting from the scene as he talked with anchorman Wolf Blitzer, who was in the cable channel’s Washington newsroom.
“Let’s face it, right now, his material is still the best of the day in terms of capturing on video what took place there,” Nancy Lane, CNN’s vice president of domestic news, said last night.
… “On this story, the Internet and digital technology have been a driving force like never before,” said Dan Abrams, general manger of MSNBC.
“We’re using Webcams, we’re soliciting any video that viewers have, we’re monitoring the online communities of MySpace and Facebook to bring viewers as much information as we can from as many places.”
Indeed one of the richest sources of information for the mainstream media became online social networking sites. “There are these communities developing on those sites with hundreds and hundreds of people - many of them students, some of whom were there at the shooting,” Abrams said.
On CNN, the earliest on-scene pictures of the Virginia Tech shooting and words were provided by Jamal Albarghouti, a Virginia Tech graduate student from the West Bank. His cell phone pictures of police charging Norris Hall as shots rang out were broadcast and streamed over and over throughout the day. The Baltimore Sun reports.
“By dinnertime, [...]
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@ 15:25
Steger said that investigators initially thought that the dorm shooting was a domestic incident and that the gunman had left campus.
Why isn’t anyone, not a single talking head or blog or the police, or ANYONE asking the question: WHY did police ASSUME he left campus? On what evidence? And why did they dismiss the dorm incident as “contained”? or as a “domestic incident” as if a domestic incident isn’t the very thing that leads to mass murders: hundreds of mass murders in this country begin with a “domestic incident.” This is the greatest dereliction of duty I have ever heard of. I think the head of campus security and the Blacksburg chief of Police should all resign. It sickens me to no end. I’d also like to know at what point the VT president (Stegar) was informed and who made the call not to broadcast that a killer was at large. WHO MADE THAT CALL!!!! Why hasn’t anyone asked these questions.