The Media's interpretation of Columbine

One of the big things about the Columbine shooting was the media confusion. During the actual shooting no one knew who it was, how many people were shooting, and why. Because so many students were saying such different things about what they had saw while in the school, it was nearly impossible to piece everything together of what had happened. For a while people thought that the killers were part of the gang the Trench Coat Mafia because Eric and Dylan were wearing trench coats at the time, but that was later proven false. The main goal of the media was to say that it was goth kids who were out to kill jocks who had bullied them before. The media was also trying to figure out what was to blame for Eric and Dylan's actions. They blamed the violent video games and movies, the crazy music, bad parenting, etc. Like the move we watched in class, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," the media is making on side look worse than the other. In the movie Spike Lee showed how poorly the news portrayed the black victims compared to the white victims. The black victims of Hurricane Katrina were viewed as looters and were always shown on top of houses without any help. This is because they were not the ones who were being saved. The white people were. And unlike the blacks who were "looting," the white victims were stealing to survive. Before ever reading this book, I had always thought that the Columbine shooters were simply loners who had no friends and were bullied all the time, but this was not true. And that is what makes this event so much scarier. Yes these kids were definitely not mentally stable, however they did have friends and were not psychopaths like the media cut them out to be. I am not trying to say these kids are angels, I just feel like the media wanted them to look like another pair of psychopaths. Dylan and Eric had always had depression issues and never liked associating with the mainstream crowds. It wasn't bad parents, video games, music, etc. Eric and Dylan were two kids who were not mentally stable and were unable to deal with the problems in the right way. In both the Hurricane and the Columbine shootings, the media tries to twist sides of the story so that as the viewer you only see it from one perspective. Both Spike Lee and Dave Cullen (author of Columbine) show different sides of the tragedy that are not shown in the mainstream media.