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When the News Hit Home, I Realized Why I'm a Journalist

By Micheal Hart
Black College Wire

Micheal Hart

On Monday, April 16, I woke up at my normal time, got dressed and left Tennessee State University's Harriet Hodgkins Hale Hall, as I have done since arriving as a freshman in 2005.

At 11:23 a.m., a phone call from my old high school friend at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., turned my normal day into a day of hell.

By now, we all know the story. That morning, a gunman, later identified as 23-year old Virginia Tech student Sueng-Hui Cho, reportedly killed 32 people and wounded 15 others.

As a military brat with ties in Virginia, this hurt. The first thing I asked myself was whether my friends were alive. After hours of phone calls, e-mails, Facebook.com and instant messages, I found that almost all were present and accounted for. I heard the stories of fear, shock and anger.

Of course, I tuned into the various news networks, just as many did. I heard terms like "college Columbine" and "massacre in the mountains," but to me this was something more. This wasn't just a report or a headline. This was my life. It got worse as I looked outside the newspaper office's windows and saw news trucks from Nashville media outside our school, probably filled with reporters wanting a story or reaction.

As a journalist, I never really thought of the other side of the story. I never understood how the victims or the people involved felt. I was just a member of the Meter team doing a job. It was my editor in chief sending me a breaking news story to put online ASAP. It was a reporter using his or her resources to compile a story. It was us as a publication doing what people expected and trusted us to do: reporting and doing the best job at it.

So when one of the Meter's reporters asked me how I felt about the situation, because of my ties to Virginia and having graduated from a school two hours from Blacksburg, I got very angry.

How dare you ask me how I felt? You don't know how I feel? Are you using me?

Then I realized why we report during time of trouble; the true reason we ask the hard questions:

It is to help heal the pain of the public. Reporters open the eyes of the community in a way no other entity can. They allow the reader to feel the same feelings that victims do, even if just for five minutes. Reporting provokes change.

I think Eleanor Roosevelt said it best: "You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do." That is what journalists do daily.

In everything we do, we go out on a limb to help the public gain strength, courage and confidence. It's not exploitation of emotions. It is giving a voice to the voiceless who wouldn't be able to convey what they felt on a larger scale without the use of journalism.

So, as the reports about this tragedy flood the news stations, please remember to sit and think about each one not as a news story, but as a wake-up call, one of change for any and everyone who reads or listens.

Micheal Hart, a a sophomore business information systems major at Tennessee State University, is online manager of the Meter. To comment, e-mail [email protected]

Posted April 23, 2007