Amarynth raises an interesting question: why is the Virginia Tech story big news in New Zealand? It’s understandable that it’s big news in Virginia, and in our departmental morning tea room where some of the staff have worked at Virginia Tech. But for the general New Zealand public it surely shouldn’t be any more interesting than any other mass shooting in the world.
I think one reason is that it’s an event that requires no prior knowledge on the part of readers. Unlike other big news stories, you don’t have to know anything about politics, science, religion or history to understand what happened: this one person went crazy and shot a lot of other people. At the risk of seeming more than usually cynical, this seems to be pretty much the level at which TV and newspapers would prefer to report on most things.