If you’re not in the news business, you may not understand all the media attention on the tragic and mysterious shooting that took place Wednesday morning in the rural southern Virginia tourist spot near Smith Mountain Lake that took the lives of a young TV reporter and her cameraman.
I can explain it this way.
People in the news business understand the risks they take when they travel to hostile locations around the world to do their jobs.
We understand what can happen to us when entering war zones to report from the front.
We even get the risks that come when reporting in high-crime urban areas in the U.S. during times of turmoil, strife and riots.
What reporters, producers, editors and camera crews never expect is for journalists to be murdered while doing live shots of an interview with the head of the chamber of commerce in a remote vacation spot in the U.S.
That’s why you see the emotional reaction from my colleagues to the murders of 24-year-old Alison Parker, a TV reporter for WDBJ in Roanoke, and her cameraman, Adam Ward, who was possibly on his last assignment for the station, having accepted a new job in Charlotte, North Carolina.
It’s crazy. It’s unexpected. It’s emotionally gripping because we’ve all been there. We’ve seen our colleagues murdered in cold blood – sometimes with seemingly no connection to the kind of stories they were working on.
That’s why the entire news industry in America is united in horror and mourning today for the deaths of our colleagues Alison Parker and Adam Ward.
Forget the motive, for a moment. Forget the person or persons responsible. That information will all come out. All the gory details will be known soon enough.
But this is about two young journalists, kids who chose the profession we chose – for some of us many, many years ago. We sympathize. We understand their career passion. We feel we know them. There’s a connection. We can see ourselves in that situation. We can imagine our own lives being abruptly and senseless ended by this kind of wicked violence.
It’s a story that really, really hits home.
I also think every American can relate to this story because it happened on TV.
Who expects to see a TV reporter and a TV cameraman killed on live television while doing a softball interview about tourism in a remote, rural setting – far from violence that has become routine in America’s urban areas?
It’s shocking.
It’s horrifying.
It’s reality television at its most gruesome.
I don’t agree with many of my colleagues in the news business about much – certainly not politics, spiritual matters, social values. But today I share the collective grief of all of us in media. We’re all stunned by what happened in Moneta, Virginia, near the Smith Mountain Lake resort – a friendly, lovely vacation community.
It reminds me of some personal experiences during my career:
- A reporter no older than Alison Parker who worked for me in Los Angeles was killed by a stray bullet decades ago, one fired by a gang member. She was off-duty, eating at a restaurant. A minute later, she was dead on the sidewalk, her life’s blood pouring out of her arteries. I remember it like it was yesterday.
- My own time as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East when caught in an artillery barrage in South Lebanon.
- My own experience witnessing a gang murder in South Central L.A.
- And the time I was chased by a Satan-worshipping gang in downtown L.A. as I retrieved my car from a dark parking lot after working a night shift. My windows were shattered, glass littering my seat, while I prayed that my little Chevy Cavalier would start on the first try. It did. If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.
We’ve all got our war stories – whether we were war correspondents or not. Today, sadly, we all seem to be war correspondents.
Media wishing to interview Joseph Farah, please contact [email protected].
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