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| Okay, Let's Try It Again With Some Emotion, People? Okay? |
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| Proper Media Behavior 101: Trained Responses |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, August 11, 1999. We have another horror in the news, and in this case it’s actually worse because we do not have the perpetrator yet as of this taping. In some ways, it is actually better, because this is the sort of thing that cannot reasonably be expected to be prevented. In Los Angeles yesterday, a Jewish community center was the victim of a deranged SOB who walked in and shot five children, at least one – a five year old boy - at death’s door. I’ll pass on wallowing in the details or in mentioning the suspect’s name. This is the sort of crime for which the death penalty – even if no deaths occur – is deserved. The news video of children just barely out of puddle duck hood, holding hands as they were escorted out by authorities, is rending. They are all clearly in shock, all scared, all changed utterly in the seconds of that nightmare. With small hyperbole, it recalls that film of children from the Holocaust camps after the war, all stunned to be alive, asked off camera to show their tattoos. Anyone who watches the following few seconds that short film, seeing four year olds rolling up their sleeves to be helpful to another set of strange and scary adults and show their huge tattooed numbers which will never come off, anyone who sees that is also changed if you have a heart and a shred of imagination. No adult ought to have to deal with that sort of thing. Children? Especially those children, who still looked to foreign adults for protection and safety which I hope they then got. Especially them. Back to yesterday in Los Angeles, hysterical parents, hugging and kissing any child within reach, are as nothing for the moment to their children, as no doubt the kids relive again and again the sight and sounds of that visitation. It is horrible, and please do not suggest now or ever that what follows is designed to make light of this. But in watching that news footage, something snapped in me. We are being trained on how to act in tragedy for the financial benefit of the news media. We’ve all more or less known that, but yesterday the cues given to interviewed parents for standard reactions was too much. We are being trained as audio bytes, video bytes, not only for the limited understanding of the news media but to the general truncation of emotional expression, for the media only wants to see certain things to which they can apply their numbing cliches. Trained seals for the amusement of offstage seals. Something else, if you forbade the following phrases and words, no news report could have covered a school shooting. These cliches are “struggle to understand this tragedy” “send a message” “violence in our schools.” Tom Brokaw, who I consider an actual idiot, keeps trying, among his other rhetoric hobbies, to sweep all violence at public buildings into one category. He compared Columbine and the recent school shootings to the incident yesterday, saying in his stentorian shriek “It’s happened again.” No, it hadn’t. There is a huge difference between a child opening fire on classmates and an adult - an utter stranger - assaulting a public building to kill children. You get the difference? Brokaw apparently does not. Far more alarming was the face time some parents and other adults had with news cameras yesterday. Clearly only a few compass headings off shock than their children, some parents turned to the camera and actually performed as trained seals. They pulled back their teeth and smiled at the camera as they expressed their gratitude for the child’s safety rather than picking up the kid and getting the hell out of there. When one mother ran out of things to say, she realized she was rudely failing her interviewer and so she leaned over to kiss her child, straightened out and smiled at the camera, repeated. All this dutifully and approvingly noted by the interviewer. But it was a pageant, not news. Eerilly, it blended in well with actor William Shatner’s press conference about the drowning death of his wife in the same news cycle. Shatner, famously vain, pointlessly came forward to give a brief press conference, at the end of which he broke into tears. It was bad acting by a bad actor who doesn’t know the difference. It was as awful as anything OJ lisped, and if a thousand warning lights did not go up over it, LA law enforcement has no hope. I wonder if the media realizes they are trying to train the public to shed any dignity and all become Shatners in moments of supposed grief? I resent and have always resented the emotional tribulations of our lives, petty or devastating, to be feeding grounds for press or media. I do not condemn stricken parents for performing as they did, they were in shock and trying to be nice in gratitude to God for the life of their child. But as a nation, if we are going to be inundated with cliché questions to which are expected cliché responses, let us rehearse answers. To the the question, “ what are your feelings about….” , regardless of the what, the correct answer is “My feelings are just that: mine.” And leave the reporter sputtering. To the question “what sort of message would you like to send….” The correct answer is “a private one.” And somewhere along the line, an old cliché needs to be revived. “None of your damned business.” |
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