SWA #5

Scared of Calling a Killer a Killer
The article “Virginia Tech and Our Impoverished Language for Evil”, written by Gregg Easterbrook for The New Republic, shows how the media is scared of making the Virginia Tech tragedy just that, a tragedy. The article talks about how many major television news companies and papers referred to Cho Seung-Hui, the killer, as a shooter and nothing more.
This article itself is more of a persuasive argument because the author wants to persuade the reader to think otherwise; to understand that Cho was not just a shooter but a killer, a murderer. The reader is not just an average reader either. The author’s targeted audience is most likely a person who reads a political news source, such as the one for which the article was written. The reader probably also has an interest in what happened at Virginia Tech that day.
The author didn’t have many constraints when writing the article; the main thing is that he pointed out all kinds of news sources, such as NBC and CNN, as being cowards for not referring to the killer for what he was. The author was also upset that the journalists and reporters made it seem as though Cho were out for a “shooting spree”, just as if he was going on a shopping.
Just like the author had his constraints while writing the piece, I had my own while reading in. A constraint that influenced me when I read the essay was the fact that I didn’t really watch the news much regarding this event. I didn’t know that the reporters referred to Cho in this way. It seems cowardly to do so, and it doesn’t help teach the nation and world that Cho was a killer, he wasn’t just a shooter. He killed 32 people that day, not including himself. This matter is not to be taken lightly, although it seems the reporters and journalists did take this way to a certain point. Easterbrook ends with a very powerful theory George Orwell showed in his novels; “unless we call a thing what it is, we can neither think about it clearly nor oppose it.”