Uvalde video shows role of local journalism
The decision by Texas news outlets to publish leaked surveillance video from inside Robb Elementary School, where 19 children and two adults were slaughtered in Uvalde, Texas, is understandably controversial.
People of good conscience can have different — and justifiable — opinions on whether such sensitive footage should be widely available.
Watching police wait in the hallways while children are being killed just on the other side of the wall is excruciating. The footage covers the 77 minutes from when the shooter crashed his vehicle, entered the school and was shot. Screams of children were edited out, however. Editors deemed them too graphic. There are no images from inside the bloody classroom, and the face of one child who manages to escape is blurred.
Neither the Austin American-Statesman nor the Austin ABC affiliate, KVUE, took the decision to publish lightly. This was not about showing controversial footage for ratings or dollars. This was the carefully considered decision of journalists to help all of us make sense of what happened in Uvalde on May 24.
The newspaper obtained the 82-minute video but also edited it down to just over four minutes of the critical moments, publishing both videos at statesman.com.
Initial reports lauded police officers as heroes who risked life and limb to prevent further losses at the school. As the days passed, however, parents and others at the site of the mass shooting raised concerns about responders who didn’t respond. They did not enter the classrooms to try to stop the killing in a timely fashion, even throwing parents to the ground who were trying to save their children.
The story that was relayed to the world in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy did not match what happened, especially as the stories from parents, eyewitnesses and survivors came out. The truth is emerging because journalists kept digging.
What happened in Uvalde must be understood fully to ensure those mistakes aren’t repeated. It is the job of local journalists to wade through what people are saying as compared to what actually happened. Often, the two are contradictory.
The surveillance footage shows dozens of officers waiting in the school halls. It took more than 70 minutes for officers to breach the classrooms. We knew of delays, obviously, from earlier reporting — but watching officers hesitate to confront the gunman, checking their phones and using hand sanitizer is infuriating.
They could have acted. They didn’t. Even officers in protective gear stayed back. Seeing it unfold — rather than reading about it — makes the case more strongly than any words that something went seriously awry in Uvalde. Confronting that reality is how we do better the next time; and with mass shootings, there is always a next time.
The decision to publish the footage, however, was not universally popular. The
Uvalde City Council has denounced it, with one council member claiming the “only reason” to release the video was for “ratings and money.” Some family members are furious, while others believe the world needs to see for itself what happened.
Critics of the decision say public availability would have happened, anyway — officials reportedly had planned to release the video after letting family members see it. However, news cannot be just what public officials choose to release on whatever schedule they deem appropriate.
The Austin newspaper and its TV partner obtained the video. They published an edited version and the complete video. That’s what journalists are supposed to do.
American-Statesman editor Manny Garcia, writing about the decision, made this case: “We have to bear witness to history, and transparency and unrelenting reporting is a way to bring change.”
That’s our job. And it’s why local journalism remains essential.