I'm not sure how I feel about this cover picture and headline, which the Tampa Bay Times ran. Well, that uncertainty isn't completely true, but moving on, the red box with type on this page reads "Virginia Tech officials and police thought a gunman had fled after killing two students. He hadn't. Two hours later, 30 more people were to die."
I think it really goes beyond an objective effort to point out that the police on campus could have had a much better response to the shootings. This kind of page, to me at least, points the finger directly at the campus police and says, "Look what your ignorance has done. Everything about this shooting is your fault." Granted, this may well be an accurate claim when adequate investigation has been given to why it took the police so long, but this is not the kind of head (at least I feel) that should be run the same day the shooting took place. Plus this paper chose to pair this headline with a photo in which all of the officers faces are visible. There's no context to where these officers were actually running or what their assignments were in the area.
There will be plenty of time for that sort of finger pointing in the days and weeks to come. But for the immediate addressing of this story, I liked the pages more that showed sorrow and compassion over the tragedy that took place. I didn't like pages like this, or the large number of papers that ran sensational headlines like "MASSACRE" or "CARNAGE."
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