<p>Yes, my point was that news outlets monitor police communications and likely sent out over the wire the initial reports of the incident and that is how major news organizations likely got the news. </p>
<p>I’m sure there are parents of students who work in the media and found out through the tweets about the lock down. I just don’t see parents, who would be obviously nervous about the situation, running to tell producers at CNN or Fox News, first thing off the bat, about the incident. This is my opinion.</p>
<p>Thanks for clarifying, emilybee. Its possible the parents, or Yale alums ARE producers on CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, etc, and would consider it newsworthy. Also, if a parent got the emergency alert email or text (I still get the hurricane warning alerts from Tulane, and b/c S#2 still lives in the area, I will Keep that link) it takes nothing to forward the email or the text on to someone in the newsroom. JMO</p>
<p>FWIW, I was the one who started all this by expressing surprise that this event “in a major urban area” wasn’t being reported on CNN . . . so please direct all criticism to me, not emilybee or others. (And, yes, I still think New Haven is a major urban area, and I’m still surprised it wasn’t on CNN. ;))</p>
<p>Not so sure. We had an actual gunman on campus at the University of Minnesota a few weeks ago, not a hoax or a phoned-in threat, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t make the national news. Local news was all over it, but national news didn’t think it was important enough to mention.</p>
<p>A man pulled a gun on a student in a campus building, trying to rob her of her laptop. She resisted and screamed, there were onlookers, the gunman fled on foot. Campus police locked down the entire West Bank campus–well, technically it wasn’t a “lockdown,” it was a “shelter in place advisory,” which means they were advising (not ordering) people to remain in their present locations behind locked doors until the campus could be searched. They searched the campus, couldn’t find him, and lifted the shelter in place advisory within a couple of hours.</p>
<p>Why didn’t this incident make the national news, while the Yale incident did? Several possibilities:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>At Yale what was threatened was a mass shooting; at Minnesota it was an attempted armed robbery. Mass shootings make the national news; armed robberies don’t. At Yale the mass shooting turned out to be a hoax, and at Minnesota the attempted armed robbery failed, but the former incident got greater attention because it potentially had greater news value on a national scale. Both incidents were newsworthy locally.</p></li>
<li><p>The Yale incident happened in Connecticut; the association with Newtown is obvious and still fresh in people’s minds. Minnesota had a mass shooting in 2005 on the Red Lake Reservation; a HS student shot and killed 10, including fellow students, a teacher, and a school security guard, and wounded 5 others. Slightly smaller scale than Newtown, but big enough to make national news. It didn’t receive anywhere near the national attention that Newtown did, in part I suspect because of Red Lake’s remote geography, in part because Red Lake is an Indian reservation while Newtown is an upper middle class suburban community. The Newtown story hits home with television network news producers and with an upper middle class audience that they see as a key demographic. Many upper middle class news producers and consumers are less shocked and less unsettled by violence on a remote Indian reservation. And in any event, Red Lake was 8 years ago; hardly anyone outside Minnesota remembers Red Lake anymore. </p></li>
<li><p>Things that happen on the East Coast, especially in the Boston-Washington corridor, have more immediacy for the national news media which are centered in New York and Washington. About the only time Minnesota makes the national news is if a major bridge collapses (happened once), there’s a drought/crop failure (happens from time to time), or temperatures in the Twin Cities hit minus 20 (happens fairly predictably 2 or 3 times a winter for 2 or 3 days at a time, but since that’s the only winter story people in other parts of the country hear about Minnesota, they assume it’s ALWAYS minus 20 here in the winter).</p></li>
<li><p>It’s Yale. The national news media are as HYPS-obsessed as some CCers. An actual mass shooting on any college campus in the country would make the national news. A report of a threat of a mass shooting? No way, unless the school has the iconic status of HYPS or perhaps a very few others.</p></li>
<li><p>All of the above. This is my hypothesis.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>New Haven is for sure an urban area. My sib used to walk around in a Yale Judo tshirt (and no he was not on the team. He has not an ounce of athletic ability or self defense skills, but wanted the man on the street to think he did!</p>
<p>Re: #2. There was a recent event at a college near V-Tech that got nothing like this coverage so its not just the “there its goes again” resonance. </p>
<p>I’d suspect it was the massive Yale over reaction that made the even news worthy. I am critical for a number of reasons but especially since people like Lanza, Holmes, and Seung Cho are anonymous losers who feel rewarded by being the center of weeks of the news cycles. The larger the reaction the more we increase the likelihood of future occurrences.</p>
<p>This is the event I am thinking of from this past April. A shotgun attack at a school 10 miles from Virgina Tech days before the 6th anniversary of the massacre. </p>
<p>There have been other campuses with incidents like this, (happened at Tulane not too long ago) but it doesnt make the news. Again-- depends on what else is going on as well that day. Agree about east coast proximity and the anniversary of the CT shootings.</p>
<p>The incident in Atl where the elementary school staff employee successfuly talked down a would be mass killer got press, but not a much as one might have expected given the disaster she averted.</p>
<p>This made me laugh…especially since the forecast for the next five days in the upper midwest looks great (sunshine, 20s-30s, and little or no precipitation). I feel for the people on the east coast whose holiday plans are in jeopardy due to the big storm.</p>
<p>I was at the Yale-Harvard football game on Saturday and was amazed at what I saw after the game. Several people, who appeared to be homeless, were pushing shopping carts through the emptying tailgating areas, searching for food and liquor. One Harvard fan was actually bringing them half-empty cans of beer to put in their carts. To avoid the traffic, we walked to a nearby coffee shop for an hour. When we left, we saw two of these cart-people walking towards us. One was so drunk that he kept falling. I was afraid to walk away, for fear that he may pass out and freeze to death.</p>