Perhaps it's because I'm from Texas, perhaps it's because I feel like I can relate to Arizona, perhaps it's because it's been all over the media lately, but I have found myself following Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford's recovery almost daily. I had been sitting in the sorority house, slightly paying attention to the workshop, when the first push notification from my CNN app lit up my iPhone.
I was caught off-guard. The notification basically reported that Giffords had been shot to death outside a grocery store in Tucson, "according to NPR." The New York Times and Washington Post blew my email up with update after update. Turns out, as you all have probably heard, NPR reported incorrectly.
News channels aired President Obama's memorial speech in Tuscon. Talking heads analyzed and criticized the speech and the reactions. And even now, the nation still follows the tragedy as Giffords opens her eyes and breathes on her own. CNN.com's homepage even has a box in the leftmost column dedicated to the "Arizona Shootings." A quick update on my iPhone's CNN app also shows that Giffords is still close to the top - coming in as the third featured headline under the "Top Stories." CNN's stories, it seems, have focused on the human element of impact, of fear, of interest. CNN seems to choose the recovery of Giffords over the political stigma surrounding the tragedy.
A cursory glance at the Washington Post online shows the different way that D.C.'s leading paper is attacking the issue: by focusing on the politics surrounding the shooting. The lede paragraph of Dan Balz and Jon Cohen's Post story reads, "Americans overwhelmingly describe the tone of political discourse in the country as negative, verging on angry, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, but more than half say that the culture did not contribute to the shootings in Tucson that killed six people and wounded 13, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.)."
News coverage, it seems to me, has been overzealous. My phone literally lost all of it's charge from all of the push notifications I received from my various news source apps. While I see the the impact and human interest of the story - the politics surrounding it, the tragedy of a mass shooting, the horror of the loss of a nine year old's life, the slow recovery of the Congresswoman - sometimes it seems to have been pushed a little too far. In my Cultural Theory class, the idea was posited that perhaps it has become much more of a political statement.
I disagree though. While I feel like the situation has been nitpicked to death, there is a certain comfort that comes from seeing the push notification that updates the status of the Congresswoman. There is a certain comfort that came from reading snippets of what Obama was saying during the breaks I snuckin the middle of formal recruitment for my sorority. Like any huge story, there is bound to be a large number of follow-ups, but I, the ever connected student, have been sated with one-liners: "Giffords is said to be breathing on her own," or "Giffords to undergo operation on eye socket" - or notifications along such lines.
Perhaps I was wrong in criticizing the overall coverage - for it is a story that, while it affects Arizona as a state, has captured the heart of the nation. Maybe I have a short attention span. However, it's nothing like the dead horse that was beat over and over again with the coverage of Michael Jackson's death in the summer of 2009...Thank goodness.
