Columbine

Reporters learn students remain trapped in the school building around 1p.m. Misty Bernall still has no news about either of her children. Cullen says, “At least two hundred to three hundred students were hiding in the school” (65). A good number of these students have access to television, as there is live TV in nearly every classroom; the students watch the disaster, of which they are a part, play out in delayed time. Cullen writes, “This was the first major hostage standoff of the cell phone age”; the media’s role in the tragedy will be profound and come under scrutiny. He adds, “Much of the country was watching the standoff unfold. None of the earlier school shootings had been televised; few American tragedies had” (66). Cullen goes on to note that “most of America was almost witnessing mass murder,” but because the cameras could not go inside the school and had missed earlier events, there was “frustration and panic [at] not knowing, [and] the mounting terror horror withheld.” Cullen adds that “The narrative unfolding looked nothing like the killers’ plan [and] only moderately like what was actually occurring” (67).