Six days after a mass shooting that killed nine, WFAA Dallas aired a special for the community to share their feelings and thoughts about the issues of mental health and guns.
A gunman opens fire on a crowd of people, killing many.
How often have we heard that?
And no matter where it happens, we all feel a little diminished, helpless to understand why.
On Saturday afternoon, May 6, at a popular outlet mall in Allen, a Dallas suburb, a gunman dressed in black fired dozens of rounds indiscriminately into the crowd outside the mall. Fifteen people were shot within the first four minutes. Nine people, including the perpetrator, were killed during the shooting.
Six days later, on Friday, May 12, following the 6 p.m. news, WFAA, Tegna’s ABC affiliate in Dallas-Ft. Worth, aired a special hour-long presentation, Action After Allen: A WFAA Special Presentation, to help the community move forward and heal.
Carolyn Mungo, WFAA’s VP and station manager, says WFAA’s newsroom was nearing exhaustion following days of covering the tragedy.
She says Ryan Wood, an experienced news producer at the station, who had recently been appointed to a new position at the station, director of community impact, came into her office and offered to take on the responsibility of producing a special to help the community.
Mungo says Wood’s new position is “designed to be much more attuned to the needs of the community in the moment, staying closer to the news department and responding in real-time in much more meaningful ways.”
“My goal with this role was to use my news expertise to create a stronger connection between the newsroom and the community department,” Wood says. “The newsroom is full of people who live in these communities. I live in one of our communities. Carolyn lives in one of our communities.”
After helping news cover the shooting on Saturday, Wood says on Sunday he texted his community impact team to come prepared on Monday morning with suggestions of how to help the community.
The team landed on the idea of bringing “together people who previously have been impacted by mass gun violence to share their own experiences and journeys with trauma to provide real first-person experience with what they are going through,” Wood says.
Mungo says the outlet mall was one of the most popular shopping centers in north Texas and that probably thousands of people there were affected even if they were not injured.
Mungo says that larger audience was lost in the coverage of the shooter, the victims and the family pain, all valid in the station’s news coverage. “But what about those who were just on the sidewalk that day and their eyes saw it, how are they doing?”
Wood says there’s a ripple effect when mass gun violence occurs.
“You have the people who are killed, you have the people who are injured and you have the people who are still in the area where it happened very much victimized by the violence though maybe not physically by being shot.”
Wood says he wanted the special to be a conversation for the audience to share their feelings and thoughts about the issues of mental health and guns.
“We opened up a phone line where people can record voicemails,” Wood says. “We got several hundred voicemails from north Texans.”
Mungo says finding the right guests was crucial and that most people thanked the station for doing the special.
During the special, the station made clear that it would not be addressing the gun debate — “you can’t get into this topic without people saying you guys are one-sided,” Mungo says. “But we are real proud of what we did.”
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