Gareth! You young pretender, you! This is the sort of headline reserved for Merlin! I was appalled by the BBC tonight - Natash Kaplinsky virtually slavering over the word 'horror' (horror x 3, horrifying x 1) and then some other woman joined her and her co-presenter going over text messages from students inside the building! Good grief - are we so desperate for instant gratification we have to have everyone from ten miles away (and bearing in mind this is a huge campus of some 25,000 18+ y.o.'s) desperate for their five seconds of fame (five minutes is waaay too long, Andy W) on television?
Once upon a time, we might've had a fairly solemn announcement, promising the facts to follow. Not any more - we have to have instant video phone footage of cops running around looking horrendously overweight and confused. Instant replays. Instant phone messages from people who may have heard a shot. Instant texts from more people who heard shots. Then, really disgracefully, and with no regard at all for the real people this affects - the parents, relatives and close friends of those in the buildings - descriptions of 'bloody bodies'. For goodness' sake, let's not have our national broadcaster present this as if it's just one step away from a video game!
Oh, and instant non-information from Matt Frei in Washington, who helpfully researched the fact that this is nothing unusual in America, except that 'it's the second university shooting since 1969, the other 19 in the past 10 years have been in schools' - standby for a ratings index! As usual, and as Frei probably wearily predicted, there'll be outrage, grief, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments by assorted talking heads, but in the end, the right to bear arms will not be dented one little bit. And the prospect of perhaps another 19 mass shootings in the next 10 years beckons.
