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Sometimes Too Removed

One thing every news reporter has to be careful of after a little while is becoming too removed from the story.  It’s a hard thing to explain, but sometimes we are faced with so many car crashes, emotional interviews, or events most call “bad news” that we remove ourselves from the situation.  My professor used to remind us, “You’re human first.  Then you’re a reporter.” It’s something I didn’t think would be so easy to forget.  Until a year ago today.

I was a production assistant at CBS6 News in Richmond when news broke of a shooter on Virginia Tech’s campus.  I ran camera in the studio while the frantic reporter in front of me struggled with changing numbers and worried phone-calls from parents.  I ran the camera and helped with the show as if it were business as usual, just my job.  It wasn’t until I’d left the station and received a phone-call from one of my friends that I actually realized the severity of the events.  I was helping to broadcast them on television but it didn’t even occur to me that they could affect me too.  As a student at Virginia Commonwealth University and a Virginia resident my entire life up to that point, several of my friends attended Tech.  I began making phone-calls, and reached all of them except my friend Kate.

That’s because she was in one of the classrooms the shooter attacked.  It still pains me to think of what she had to see; what the killer did to her classmates and instructor.  She suffered a bullet wound to her hand and with a fellow student, despite her injury, helped block the door so he wouldn’t get back in.  She still struggles every day with what happened. 

In the days that proceeded we could only watch television, waiting for the numbers to turn into names and make sure ours were okay.  Students wondered if it could happen to us, just a few hours drive away.  I watched my friend find out about the death of his classmate on CNN.  We didn’t learn that week, we were just glued to screens or clutched in each others’ arms. 

One moment three days after the massacre captured the emotion and put it all into perspective.  Virginia’s governor stood in the middle of VCU’s campus and spoke to anyone walking by, as hundreds of students wearing orange shirts watched breathlessly.  He said simple words, “they were our friends.” I thought about how the word means so much in every language just as grief is universal.  Those events had such a personal impact on so many, as many stories we cover do.

It’s times like that when we can’t help but be reminded, we’re human first.  Then a reporter.

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