Broadcasting ‘the Shock, the Horror, the Outrage’ Live, Again and Again
Last week, the CNN anchor Brianna Keilar found herself, for the second time in under a week, guiding viewers through the grim ritual of trying, and failing, to make sense of another mass shooting.
In 2019, Ms. Keilar reported on the back-to-back shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.
In 2018, she spoke with relatives of students killed in the shooting in Parkland, Fla.Broadcast journalists like Ms. Keilar, 40, have now spent the bulk of their reporting careers chronicling an unending, uniquely American horror show: the random gun massacre.
She was CNN’s first journalist to arrive on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007.
“I just wonder, can you count how many times you’ve covered a story like this?” she asked, her voice catching.