Newscasts Cover VA Tech Shootings, Again

“It’s happened again,” Brian Williams said at the top of his NBC Nightly News broadcast, referring to another deadly shooting at the Virginia Tech campus that left two people dead on Thursday afternoon.

NBC had a report on the shooting of a police officer and a second victim, believed to be the gunman, from its justice correspondent Pete Williams as well as taped accounts from university students.

ABC’s World News, on Thursday anchored by David Muir, had a report from Jim Sciutto from the Virginia Tech campus and heard about the events from eyewitnesses. ABC had aired a special report on the shootings at 2:58 p.m. ET anchored by Muir in New York.

Scott Pelley said on the CBS Evening News that the first news of the shootings Thursday “sent a shudder through the newsroom,” and his broadcast had Elaine Quijano reporting live from the scene in Blacksburg, Va.

Virginia Tech was the site of the deadliest shooting incident in U.S. history in 2007 when student gunman Seung-Hei Cho killed 32 people before committing suicide.

University officials were in Washington Thursday to appeal a $50,000 fine for its handling of the incident in 2007 when it waited about two hours to alerts students of a gunman on the campus.