SWA #5

Gregg Easterbrook’s article “Virginia Tech and Our Impoverished Language for Evil” is about the way the language used to describe what happened at VT was “cleaned up” down essentially to be more politically correct.
The Author is addressing a large group of people. He is talking to anyone in America who watches the news. These are the people that are affected by what is said in the news. He uses specifically the VT coverage to prove his point but what he says about VT can be applied to almost any news story. The author is afraid that those who watched the VT coverage did not fully grasp the magnitude of this tragedy. He wants everyone to understand how awful it really was. He is likely also trying to send a message to the media, who are responsible for trying to make these tragedies seem less horrific.
The author of this work is Gregg Easterbrook. He believes that the media doing things like merely calling the mass murderer involved in the VT massacre a shooter doesn’t do the situation justice. He believes that by calling Cho a shooter we are working around the problem instead of facing the true situation. The author is trying to send a message to Americans and to the media that this is not acceptable.
There is one major constraint involved in this article. The author or the reader may have a deeper connection with the VT murders than just seeing them on the news. A friend or relative could have been one of the people killed, the reader may go to VT, and the author may have gone to VT. Any of these things would give the author or the reader a prejudice against Cho. A reader may also have some connection to the media that gives them a bias towards the media’s side of why it’s called a shooting and not a murder. A reader may have children that they don’t want to expose to the horrors of what really happened. Any of these things could create a bias.
The exigence of this article is the way in which the media handled the killings at VT. The author felt that after such a tragedy, the media should tell the story for what it is and not try to work around the bad parts to make it sound nicer.