Journalism keeps you planted in the earth. – Ray Bradbury
This is a sports blog. You know that by looking at the name. But today is different. I can’t stick to sports today. I just can’t. And it’s because of what happened at 6:45 this morning in Moneta, Virginia, just outside of Roanoke.
At that time, reporter Alison Parker was interviewing Vicki Gardner, a high-ranking official in the local Smith Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce, about the current state of tourism in the area. Routine interview. Or so it seemed.
Then, as Gardner was speaking, a gunshot rang out. It was captured in this video (WARNING: Video contains extremely disturbing content).
The end result was the worst possible one: Parker and her cameraman (Adam Ward) were dead; the general manager of WDBJ confirmed this much on the air later in the morning. Parker was 24; Ward was 27.
But then, the shooting took an even more horrifying turn. The shooter, 41-year old Bryce Williams, posted a video (presumably taken from a GoPro) of the shooting on Twitter and Facebook. As bad as this, too many people were subjected to it; due to auto-play on both applications, many on both social media accounts saw the shared or retweeted video on their timelines and were unable to stop it.
This was as surreal of a story as there you could ever imagine. What made it more unbelievable was the fact that all of it was caught on live television, or, as we found out later, a GoPro. So why I am I writing this article on a sports blog?
Well, it’s a complicated answer, but the main reason is at I am an aspiring future journalist. I think of myself as something of a journalist now, with this blog, but not really. I’m not in the industry, I’m not out covering stories, and I’m not subjecting myself to harm like Ward and Parker did. And I have all the respect on the planet for real-world journalists, especially after the events of today.
On-camera reporters often face distractions during their reporting, and they’re usually very innocuous. Most of the time it’s people like this (WARNING: video contains a brief moment of mature content).
But, in reality, the Baba Booey guy is representative of the distractions field reporters face 95% of the time. There also exists another popular, sexist, and extremely inappropriate phrase that many reporter-hecklers have used in a live shot (you can find out for yourself what it is). But, the consequence of those occurrences? The reporter throwing back to the studio, the studio anchor apologizing, and the newscast moving on. No one is physically harmed.
So this is a new frontier. And it should make us realize: a journalist/reporter’s job is really hard. We often see certain people on TV and think, “That’s just another teleprompter-reading, stupid TV anchor/reporter”, and that could not be further from the truth. Even singer Don Henley crooned in his solo hit “Dirty Laundry”, “We got the bubble-headed bleached blonde, comes on at five/she can tell you ’bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye”. Again, this opinion of reporters couldn’t be further from the truth. TV, and in particular, reporting, takes so much more than a smile and a hair color. Unfortunately, part of that includes shutting out extraneous distractions, something that Parker and Ward had to do in the last moments of their lives.
And a piece written by Jaye Watson on her blog absolutely knocks it out of the park. Read it. It is the best piece of writing I have read on this senseless tragedy and maybe one of the best essays I’ve ever read. Here is the last part of it, which perfectly encapsulates the role of a journalist in making the world a better place:
It’s enough to make you wonder, who in the hell would want to do a job like that?
Us.
Because deep down inside, we are the same in believing that we can make a difference.
We can change things.
We can expose rot.
We can give a voice to the voiceless.
We can make people happy.
We can make them angry.
We can be the catalyst for change.
We are the ones at the shooting, the city council meeting, the hospital bedside, the big high school game, the war zone, the grieving family’s living room.
We take what we hear and I swear we do our damndest to regurgitate it back to you the best we can.
We want you to know what we know.
I didn’t know Alison Parker or Adam Ward, but I would bet they entered this business with an idealized, deep desire to make the world a better, more informed place. They wanted to tell good stories. They wanted to be part of the change.
One person, a Glock and GoPro toting person, stole the promise of their lives, ensuring they would experience no more ‘firsts,‘ of any kind.
I beg of you to remember one thing.
He was not one of us.
And this is why journalists are so important; they make the world better. They force change through ingenious investigative reporting. Going back to sports for just one second, if it weren’t for two journalists (Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru), we wouldn’t have had the information about Cris Carter’s fall guy comments at last year’s NFL rookie symposium. And if it weren’t for great investigative reporting, we likely wouldn’t have ever found out about Watergate, the horror of the Vietnam War, or the unethical surveillance ways of the NSA.
Journalism is essential. It was attacked today. Whether you like it or not, today was an attack on free speech and journalism, by a disgruntled reject from the outside. We shouldn’t be talking about the shooter’s motive right now (he killed himself this afternoon) but it probably had nothing to do with attacking free speech. From all accounts, the gunman had been fired from several outlets, was not easy to work with, and had an anger issue. He was fired from WDBJ in 2013 and reportedly refused to leave the offices. (He would later file a wrongful termination lawsuit against WDBJ; it was unsuccessful.)
But we can try to figure out motives later. This moment is about remembering Alison Parker and Adam Ward, two aspiring journalists, doing something they did every day: their job. Two innocent lives, put in danger by a savage gunman aiming to finish them. And, the saddest part, two soon-to-be-spouses.
Ward was engaged to one of the producers at the station, and (this is terrifying), she had to watch his death from the control room. It was her last day at WDBJ, and Parker had supposedly brought in balloons for the celebration. Parker had moved in with fellow station reporter Chris Hurst, and according to Hurst, they had future plans for their lives, too:
We were together almost nine months. It was the best nine months of our lives. We wanted to get married.We just celebrated her 24th birthday
— Chris Hurst (@chrishurstwdbj) August 26, 2015
This is the real shame of today; they were young. They had most of their lives ahead of them. But that all ended at 6:45 this morning.
But this is what I hope comes out of this: I hope people respect the role of journalists in our society. The job always brings its perils, and while we usually equate reporters being harmed with their reporting in war zones, those perils walked into the living rooms of the greater Roanoke area just after dawn today, and maybe changed the journo industry forever. While the piece Parker and Ward were doing was an everyday, routine piece, people like them serve a big role in our society, as a conduit to the American public.
But they’re gone now. And may they rest in peace.