obstacle - Kent Ninomiya
Kent Ninomiya. An unexpected obstacle that young journalists face is the difficulty dealing with tragedy close up. Everyone has a different tolerance for this. In general the more sheltered a childhood you had the more arduous this process will be. It is quite a bit different seeing a murder victim in person than it is on TV. You can't just turn down the volume of a screaming mother anguished over the death of her child. The smell of death and the taste of violence linger with you long after you leave a scene. Young journalists must be prepared for this. TV news is not all glammor and nice hair. We seek out tragedy. If you can't handle this you should do something else. I know many people who left the business for percisely this reason. They took the tragedy home with them and it ate them up inside. If you can't leave it at work then it will consume you.
A man opened fire yesterday at an Omaha mall killing 8 people. On the surface this may appear to be a big story. The sad truth is that events like this are somewhat commonplace in America. They are so common that most of us who don't live in Omaha will forget it ever happened in a few weeks. It's so common that I couldn't tell you how many stories like that I've covered in my career. Is it 40, 50 , 100? I have no idea. Mass shootings are all about the body count. Virginia Tech was a big deal because so many people died. This Omaha mall shooting was barely noticed. Does that make the deaths any less tragic? Of course not, but media attention devoted to the event is directly proportional to the body count.There was a mass shooting I covered in Los Angeles I remember well. A man walked into a grocery store and shot up the place before killing himself. When police went to his apartment they found his dead parents on the bed. Apparently he murdered them two years earlier and left them there. He told neighbors they moved away and nobody bothered to check. I have no idea why they didn't smell the bodies. By the time the cops got there the parents were skeletons. I remember this story so vividly because of the sordid details, not because of the people who died in the supermarket. It's unfortunate but true.
Kent Ninomiya
