By Ira Winkler

I admit that I have never been a person to be traumatized by horrific events. Maybe that is the reason that I am fairly aggravated with all of the coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre. It did bring many people face to face with their mortality, and clearly had a devastating effect on the people who were directly affected. People who were directly affected, who personally knew people who were killed or were injured themselves.

However all the media coverage reminds me of how people treat their children. For example, think about a child who falls down. If an adult runs over in a panic and acts like the child is hurt, the child will start to scream hysterically. If however the people standing around do nothing, and act like it is not serious, the child will get up and go on playing.

In this case, the media is running around telling people that they should be traumatized by virtue of having any association with the event. They are acting like it is a monumental task for people to get up in the morning. They are talking about all the post traumatic stress that they should have. All of the media coverage makes people believe that they should be blithering idiots if they have anything to do with Virginia Tech.

Again, I am not denying anyone one their grief. However all of the focus on what people should be experiencing is only proliferating those feelings much further than they would otherwise go. The media is creating many more victims than any criminal every could.

Related posts:

1. Does it really matter that the VT killer used the Internet?
2. No Hacking Required
3. The risks of a poorly understood reputation based economy - Part I - People
4. If the groundhog sees his shadow the Internet will be insecure. If not; Internet security needs improvement.
5. Welcome to Riskbloggers.com

Posted by Ira.Winkler on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007, at 5:41 am, and filed under Articles.

Follow any responses to this entry with the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can post a comment, or trackback from your site.