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| We've Got To Suffer If We Want to View The Newssssss...... |
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| You a Victim of Columbine Shooting? I'm Not. The Ethics of News Coverage |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, April 21, 1999. During my travails that eventually led me to jail, one of the oddest sequences involved my re-fusal to speak to the press at all. They were offended, as if they had a right to my story, as if it was wrong to deprive them of career advancement. And when I didn't squeal, the story dissolved. It was an up close and personal accumulation of proof that the media does not discover and work a story, anymore. If it ever did. All it does is get reaction from one party and then run to another to get their reaction to that, and then try to pound it into one of their tried and true templates. It isn't news, it isn't even created news, it is simply crap. It is easy to manipulate, it is easy to create fiction for the devious and self-serving. And now, as Jefferson County sifts through the horror of yesterday, the incompetent, lazy, and self serving local media illustrates again how truly bizarre they are, and how credulous and foolish are we for giving them the respect we do. In the midst of a slaughter of innocents by other children, grown, hypothetically intelligent men and women asked their on-the-scene reporters if there was a 'lot of emotion' among the hysterical students. It was, in every way, a moronic question except that it was not really a question. It was a cue. It was a reminder to shove a microphone into the face of any in-shock student, any traumatized parent, anyone at all likely to dissolve under the pressure and give some easy cues to other old television chestnuts. One female news anchor on channel nine summed up the desired conclusion she wanted us to draw. "Students, teachers, parents, we are all victims…." You a victim? I'm no victim. Neither was this news anchor. Neither were most of the people on campus, except in the most general, and therefore irrelevant sense. The victims are dead, dying, or in a great deal of pain. Traumatized witnesses and families in grieve or near grieve are also, but lesser, victims. Puzzled students herded out without being in danger were potential victims only. Parents in general, which was the focus group being pandered to at that moment by the news anchor, are not the victims at all. They are the culprits. I have said before that the Amalgamated Federation of Crappy Parents is biggest, best-funded, and most popular lobby group in America. We are to believe that the murderers, who killed themselves after the deed, gave no warning signs, had no history of predictable psychoses, and that caring, sensitive parents didn't know? The issues will now get pointlessly clouded. For example, in the immediate future, mostly because of the NRA convention, we will be inundated with gun/anti-gun propaganda by the yahoos on both sides, just about all of it irrelevant, since the weapons were shotguns and pipe bombs, and I say this as a proponent of some sort of gun control. We will also be treated to touching tributes to the heroic teachers who or may not have acted beyond the call by the Teacher's Union. We will bask in the reflected honor of those police who disarmed pipe bombs. We will all cry along with the students who may or may not have ever met the actual victims at the zillion memorial services. The parents of these murderers will never be brought to trial for unleashing these clearly disturbed, unnurtured thugs upon the populace. Aren't parents responsible for their children's actions until the age of eighteen? Late last night, television started congratulating itself that a few students had the forethought to call television stations before 911 when those kids were cowering in closets - or claimed to be - while the gunmen ran amok. The stations pretended to be saying the opposite, but they put the kids on the air so they could be heard to be told to call 911. If they are going to take the time to shove microphones into the mouths of people they concurrently claim are victims, and therefore in shock, and who therefore should civilly be denied by courtesy the opportunity to make fools of themselves, the media should do so with the people responsible. Where the hell were those parents, the people responsible for the murder? If their own kids were eighteen or under, aren't they legally to blame, as if they had made the pipe bombs themselves and not just supposedly remained in ignorance of the bomb factory in their own homes, or allowing their kids the time to learn to make them and to do so? Despite story lead ins, the nation is not "struggling to come to grips with the tragedy." The nation is struggling to cover up the real problem: us. We all know the cause is crappy, lousy parents and we know that the line dividing their actions from most of our own is thin and getting thinner. We don't want to find out that our parenting skills are little better than those of the murderers' and that society and television and the media, far from causing the crime, may actually, in our case, have compensated for our deficiencies and saved us from the same fate. It is a grotesque hypocrisy. |
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