Reporter laments ‘ invasion’ of Sutherland Springs

In the days after Sunday’s mass shooting at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, the town’s main crossroads became a corridor of massive television trucks.

Dozens of news crews lined both sides of the street. Cars crawled at half the speed limit to make way for reporters crossing, setting up wires, ordering pizza, pitching makeshift tents. Swarms of journalists trampled the lawns of homes near the church. The Valero gas station’s convenience store, one of the town’s few businesses, began selling out of items.

It was as if a second town was dumped onto an existing one, in the midst of an unimaginable tragedy that left 26 dead and 20 injured.

After any mass shooting, members of the news media swoop into town to document the stories of the victims and their loved ones. Each time this happens, family members affected by the attack are forced to mourn their loss while also addressing reporter after reporter knocking on their doors. It’s a dreaded pattern, for both the families trying to grieve and the reporters trying to do their jobs.

But as one journalist, Dallas Morning News reporter Lauren McGaughy, pointed out, Sutherland Springs is very different from a big city such as Las Vegas.

This tiny town, “three square blocks of homes in which nearly every person lost someone,” McGaughy wrote, “should have been treated with more care.”

In a commentary published by the Morning News on Thursday, McGaughy said she was “sickened” by the overwhelming presence of the journalists in Sutherland Springs.

“Dear Sutherland Springs, you deserve an apology from the news media,” she wrote, acknowledging that she felt her own presence was an “intrusion.”

“People were holed up in their homes, loathing how a simple trip to the Dollar General would put them in our paths,” McGaughy wrote. “It was an invasion. It was too much.”

She urged members of the media to have a conversation about “how best to chronicle horrors like this.”

“Sometimes, for victims, telling their stories can be cathartic,” McGaughy wrote. “As journalists, our role as observers and investigators in times of tragedy is important. But so is our empathy and our humanity.”

Her piece appeared to resonate with journalists and locals alike.

“This reporter says what some of us have felt for a long time,” tweeted Kris Betts of KVUE, the ABC affiliate in Austin. “We can do better.”