Boston bombings and media scrums: Let's keep it professional

While watching coverage of the police and FBI and several CNN anchors go after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, my senses were so overly heightened that for a while, I took a (very uncharacteristic) nap, dreaming that my ex-boss told me my web site looked great, before springing to attention to continue watching the manhunt.

I was watching when CNN's reporter heard the gunfire in his earpiece around 7 p.m. Friday, then followed along as that middle-aged lady reporter with the pert hairdo was told to get out of the way by police. Sirens, screeching police cars, a populus told it's ok to come and then sorry, no it's not, go back in.

In the midst of all this drama, I wish the media had remembered that while it's important to inform the public, we neither expect nor want you to slither around the bushes behind that house where the suspect was holed up, bleeding from the head, in that poor guy's boat. ( By the way, why is there a fund to buy him a new boat? Shouldn't the cops and FBI already have cut that check? But I digress.)

Don't kid yourselves, broadcast media, you were tripping all over yourselves and your colleagues to get this story. It got sloppy at times, as when CNN's camera craned around quickly and got Lester Holt of NBC in its shot, albeit briefly.

At the media scrum, a militant conspiracy theorist reporter tried to interrupt proceedings, as he later did on Erin Burnett's show. Even after she told him to pipe down, he went on for awhile, distracting us, the viewer, from watching Ms. Burnett's perfectly poised presentation of the police activity.

I'm in the print media and don't typically cover manhunts and bombers and cities that close down, so maybe I don't really know what I'm talking about. But I do think less is more, more often than not, in most things. And in America, where bigger is always better and more is always better, aren't we just feeding the fire that these terrorists so despise? Why the need to raise American flags and brag about how we got 'em! We got 'em! As if this was a sporting event.

No, it was terror. The same kind of terror that rages in the Middle East, Africa, North Korea and many parts of the world most of us have never heard of, much less read about or explored.

The media needs to stand back, do its job, and not fight for ratings. And oh yes, I can do without the scary mood music and the graphic: "CITY UNDER SIEGE" visuals.