Pain of Columbine coverage revisited
By Carolyn Farr

Panelists Roger Simpson, director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, and former Denver Post national editor Michelle Fulcher listen as Rocky Mountain News Editor John Temple answers a question from the audience during a review of news media coverage of the April 1999 shootings at Columbine High School.

Heartbreak.” “High School Massacre.” “Hate Hits Home.” Newspaper headlines lined the blackboards of the classroom in Eaton Humanities on the CU-Boulder campus on April 1, signaling that it was time to revisit coverage of the Columbine High School killings five years after the tragedy near Littleton.

“Columbine was a story that resonated worldwide,” said Michelle Fulcher (’78), former national editor of The Denver Post, after a screening of “Covering Columbine,” a documentary showing the effect that coverage of the prolonged and intense tragedy had on news professionals.

“One thing that has changed in the media is that there is a much stronger sense of debate in these issues,” said Fulcher, one of three panelists on hand to reflect on lessons learned since April 1999.

She said Post staff members now take greater care in debating all possibilities when covering dramatic events. Heated newsroom debates on how to cover such events are more frequent, she added.

The tragedy changed forever how the public views important issues involving teen-agers, gun control, media and violence, Fulcher said.

The panelists agreed that one large impact Columbine had on their journalistic work was to remind them of the importance of respecting the victims and their families.

Roger Simpson, director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, emphasized that journalists must learn how to respect the victims in a tragedy and how to approach them appropriately.

John Temple, editor of the Rocky Mountain News, told the predominately student audience that he always tries to imagine that his paper is an “invited guest in a stranger’s house.” Temple said that on some occasions, violent images such as those shot during the Columbine attacks need to be shown, but he tries to keep offensive and graphic images off the front page.

The editors’ expressions of sensitivity weren’t enough to calm the anger of a young woman in the audience who identified herself as a former Columbine student.
“We hated the media,” she said. She recounted how the news coverage made her personal experience of Columbine more painful.

She said that relentless media coverage “constantly reminded” students of the horror of the killings. The students, she said, were the ones who had to live with the images that the media kept replaying.

Fulcher told the journalism students to pay attention to the former Columbine student and remember the intensity of her feelings regarding news media.

Temple gave the aspiring journalists in the room some advice.

“Tell the story not as how they died, but how they lived,” he said.