Jack Shafer posts a typically abrasive column at Slate on the VT killings which concludes:

As reporters intrude into the lives of the grieving to mine the story, they should be guided more by a sense of etiquette than ethics. If they don’t risk going too far, they’ll never go far enough.

I was early on the scene in Dunblane (having been filming near in the Borders that morning), and I lean towards Shafer’s point of view. My only reservations are that there’s a tendency to justify the intrusion by romanticising places. Here’s a typical example from an AP wire:

The vigil Tuesday evening testified to the unity on which the mountain campus prides itself. In the hours after Cho Seung-Hui’s rampage, though, it was obvious the close- knit school was a community of which he never felt a part.

You don’t say. Modern life is stranger than that, and cliches are the surrender flags in the struggle to understand it.

And before we all slap ourselves on the back, I thought I’d share a comment from the blog of NBC anchor Brian Williams:

Please, let it rest. Don’t you know that the endless stream of repetitive information dishonors the dead, tortures the victims’ relatives, and is only trivialized by pointless musings about what might, or might not, have been done with a mentally ill young man. And yes, let’s use this tragedy once again to have the same stale, indecisive debate about gun control, knowing full well that the NRA will continue to prevent any meaningful change. Seriously, can’t we do better? Isn’t it time for news to be news, not endless, repetitive wallpaper that at once offends and numbs?

Offends and numbs…