Virginia Tech Massacre Ripples Through Primetime TV

LOS ANGELES (April 17, 2007) — Coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre dominated primetime on Monday night and the pressure was on as news networks quickly mobilized dozens of anchors and reporters to the Blacksburg campus.

In the MSNBC control room, it was organized chaos as producers and directors scrambled to relay the breaking news as it rolled in.

MSNBC’s chief legal correspondent Dan Abrams said the biggest challenge was time.

“This is certainly going to consume a good amount of our coverage,” Abrams told Access Hollywood. “A lot of things have to happen at once. We’ve got to distribute our personnel as quickly as possible. We’ve got to try and gather as much information as we can and yet we also have to be very sensitive to the story.”

Katie Couric’s CBS Evening News expanded to an hour and NBC’s Nightly News with Brian Williams had limited commercial breaks and a live interview with two of the victims.

“I was shot in the arm and the bullet went through,” one of the wounded students told Williams.

“A man ran in and shot our professor and we all just got on the ground really quick,” another added.

NBC’s “Dateline” put together a last minute one-hour special hosted by Ann Curry while ABC’s “Nightline’s” John Donvan went inside the dorm rooms with the students.

“Every single TV is turned on to the news,” a student told Donvan. “Usually it’s MTV or something like that.”

Meanwhile, FOX has decided to pull tomorrow night’s episode of “Bones,” which dealt with finding human remains on a college campus.

During the CMT Music Awards on Monday, host Jeff Foxworthy took time out to acknowledge the shootings. However, on CBS, David Letterman didn’t address the tragedy.

And on NBC, a somber Jay Leno talked about the massacre in his opening “Tonight Show” monologue.

“You all know what happened and our thoughts and prayers go out to the family and friends of Virginia Tech,” Leno said. “Our job has always been to kind of end your day and maybe get a few laughs so that’s what we’ll kind of try to do. So I just want to be respectful. We’ll do some jokes, be silly, but we don’t want to forget what happened today.”

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