Erstwhile Muse

Freedom of the Press (to politely sod off to a nunnery)

or good news, none of the 180 people blown up in Iraq yesterday were VT students!

The subtitle for this post is actually a direct quote of a message I received from Lee early Thursday morning in the midst of yet another day of deluge coverage from the Virginia Tech campus where the various and sundry members of the Fourth Estate were doing their best to wring blood from stones in attempt to fill their rapacious scheduling needs. Sadly not even my normal news sources such as NPR and the BBC World Service were immune to this, although the BBC coverage was, as usual, the most balanced attempt at placing the news (such as it was) within the greater context of happenings in the world at large.

This morning though I awoke to a yet another story on the VT shooting aftermath on NPR's Morning Edition. The part I regained full consciousness for was a snippet of an interview with VT sophomore Brittany Johnson, discussing the situation wherein students had begun to feel besieged by the phalanx of satellite vans and attendant media regalia, and was quoted thusly:

There's a point to where we say enough's enough and you got your story. We can't heal properly as long as all the press is here…I personally think the media should let it go. You have your story.

Ms. Johnson was terribly polite in her reply to the media I think, too polite for some of them to get it, so I'll attempt to translate: Piss off you scab picking corpse humpers!

Labels: ruminations