Omaha Mall Shooting

The New York Times' coverage of a fatal shooting at an Omaha Mall yesterday is both chilling and level-headed. The article conveys the facts of the shooting without indulging in sensationalism, but the quotes and small details of the scene included in the article recreate the situation enough to give readers a sense of the shock and horror of the crime. Particularly noteworthy were the descriptions of the live piano music that continued to play even after the first shots were fired in the department store and the accounts of people huddled together in dressing rooms with strangers, "unsure how to escape something they could not see." The article also does a good job describing the mall's surroundings in Omaha, a city which it notes has begun to see an increase in violent crime in the last year but is generally considered to be very safe.

After following the coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings in the British press last spring, I was curious to see how they would handle this. The Times of London provides coverage similar to the NYT, except at the end of the article, they include two paragraphs recapping VA Tech and U.S. gun control laws. There is a sidebar giving a timeline of recent shootings in the U.S. (as they did in the spring in response to Cho Seung Hui), headed "Catalogue of killing." I also recall being in the U.K. in 2000 when a disgruntled employee killed several people in the Wakefield, Ma., office that had just fired him. It was front page news for days. The differing gun control laws between the U.K. and the U.S. seem to make all coverage of shootings in this country seem sensationalized, but perhaps what that really suggests is the disturbing extent to which Americans have become desensitized to such violence.