TV Turn off Week...or What is WRONG with us?

NBC ‘massacres’ a delicate story

Charter Oak-Ute NEWSpaper — Schleswig Leader, Thursday, April 26, 2007 – Page 3

I’m kind of a journalistic purist who believes that newspapers should provide information that readers can use toward sound judgements essential to the healthy functioning of a democracy. I want to train kids to be better communicators for the common well being of the community and to be more savvy consumers of the media, equipped to be discriminating. Call me a hopeless idealist, but that’s what happens when you’ve been teaching journalism for over a decade.

There are these things called the elements of news-worthiness, that you’re supposed to consider when deciding whether or not to cover something, such as timeliness, proximity, prominence, consequence, conflict, and human interest. All of these ought to be weighed against the news agency’s concept of what they see as the public’s well being.

Before releasing the contents of a package sent to them by mass murderer Seung Hui Cho, NBC failed to consider anyone’s well being. All they seemed to have cared about was ratings and “scooping” everybody else.

But that’s not the only problem with how this story has been handled.
I was appalled by the media’s coverage of the tragedy at Virginia Tech last week.
I overheard a variety of responses in the faculty lounge. Most were disgusted by how TV news has been milking it for everything it’s worth and disappointed by how emotional and melodramatic coverage has been. Perhaps more restraint and stoicism would’ve actually been more respectful.

Others were concerned that there was SO much speculation and reporting before there had been any information even collected by, let alone released by law enforcement.

A couple of people said that they can’t stand to pay attention to the news because everything is so negative. Others find it ironic that 2-3 times as many people die each day, everyday in Iraq, but that doesn’t receive near as much coverage or as much sensationalism.

I know I was surprised that on Tuesday nigh TV reporters interviewed a number of VT students who said that they didn’t think that the college could have done anything better to protect them- but the next morning’s paper featured a headline about how frustrated students were that the college didn’t do more.

This afternoon on National Public Radio, they interviewed a college official who was frustrated that pro-gun activists were using the tragedy to argue that all students should’ve been allowed to carry concealed weapons to protect themselves. Certainly there are those on the Left who have already been blaming the shooting on Virginia’s lack of regulations of firearms. Should it be a starting point for debate?

I have to tell you, I was certainly tempted to write a column about gun control. But I decided that it would be taking advantage of a heinous incident to make a political point, so I decided not to.

How about all of the samples of the killer’s poems, stories and plays that are popping up on the web? Should the media make such a heinous killer famous posthumously?

I was absolutely sickened by the things that TV news programs aired from Cho’s now infamous package to NBC. By showing his video diatribes over and over again, not only did they give him the fame and attention which he hoped for, but I believe that they compounded the pain and damage to the families of the victims and to the communities of Virginia Tech and Blacksburg, Virginia. It was like coming in behind him with more guns, shooting people once they were already down.

NBC should’ve handed the entire package over to the FBI or at least asked experts to analyze the materials and report on them without presenting the original material, over and over again ad nauseam as they did. Who would it have hurt for them to at least have held the materials for several weeks before releasing them?

Certainly this tragedy, like others before it at high schools reveal a disconnected, unsympathetic and violent society. Certainly, like the September 11 attacks or Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it reveals how painfully unprepared our institutions are to handle crises. And certainly it reveals that we need to consider regulations and procedures in both gun availability and in the field of mental health treatment. But most of all, it revealed what a salacious, sensational, insensitive and irresponsible media we have.

Ted Mallory lives in Charter Oak and teaches at Boyer Valley Schools in Dunlap. ‘Ted’s Column’ has appeared weekly in the Charter Oak-Ute NEWSpaper since 2002. If you’d like to see any of Ted’s editorial cartoons bigger and brighter, you can visit http://tmal.multiply.com/photos/album/2 Ted has started a new blog that focuses on Journalism and the media at http://thepresscorps.blogspot.com

Rural Schools should be more prepared

Rural Schools should be more prepared
Page 3 Charter Oak-Ute NEWSpaper & Schleswig Leader- Thursday, October 12, 2006

The Congressman Foley instant-messenger sex with teenage pages and the apparent House cover-up eclipsed Bob Woodward’s new book, “State of Denial,” that scrutinized the Bush Administration’s handling of the war in Iraq. Before that, Woodward’s book overshadowed the National Intelligence Estimate that revealed many of the problems that those policies wrought.

No doubt by the time you’re reading this column, yet another story will be dominating the headlines. That’s the problem with writing for a weekly newspaper, the news cycle is 24/7 so there’s no way to know what will be relevant if you’re writing for October 12, but writing on October 5th.

But something tragic happened recently that we shouldn’t take for granted or become calloused to. Nor should we let it be lost in the media feeding-frenzy of political intrigue and personal indiscretion.

Kids were killed. Kids were killed all over the country. Not in big cities, but out here, “ out in the country.”

An October 4 story on National Public Radio (NPR) reported” Violent crime is far less common in rural areas than in cities. Rural people are four times less likely to be victims of violent crime. Yet all three school shootings in the past week occurred in rural places.”

There was a similar rash of shootings after the Columbine shootings in 1999. Virtually all of the shootings in the 90’s occurred in small cities and rural towns.

It doesn’t make sense that the safest places to live could be the most dangerous place to go to school. We feel somewhat insulated.

Schools in small towns make easier targets.

Urban schools have tighter security and more experience working with violent and troubled teens.

In rural areal guns are more easily accessible than in cities, although they’re less likely to be used in a crime. But rural kids are far more likely to be able to get a hold of a weapon easily.
In a smaller community, if a student lives on the social fringes, they have a harder time finding a place to fit in.

We’d like to think that it’s a good thing to live somewhere where everyone either knows you or knows someone who knows you, but that also means that if you’re teased or ridiculed, it’s harder to hide and it’s harder to reinvent yourself.

After the Columbine shootings, the vast majority of students identified with the victims, but a small percentage identified with the shooters because they not only got even with the bullies and the mean teachers, they also got famous.

In the years since Columbine many schools have worked hard to crack down on harassment and bullying. Districts have drafted policies and implemented programs to prevent sexual harassment, hazing and initiations of underclassmen, and discrimination based on race, religion and sexual preference.

It still may not be enough. School hallways, locker rooms, buses and classrooms are still places where it’s accepted behavior to “talk trash,” and “rip on each other.”
But it’s also not enough to work at being pro-active. Schools have to craft, review, train for and implement serious emergency management plans.

One teacher in a one-room school 80 miles from the nearest sheriff’s station suggested to an NPR reporter that they should equip schools with sirens, so that when a catastrophic event occurs, parents and neighbors will know about it for miles around.
Schools in Brown, Rock and Holt counties in North Central Nebraska were in low-down last week after a local newspaper received an anonymous call from someone who said there would be a shooting at one of the schools.

What exactly is “lock-down?” I’m a teacher and I don’t know. I’ve heard of large city schools where all of the classroom door can be closed and locked at once in case of an emergency. Sort of like battening down the hatches on a ship.

We’re told where to take kids in a tornado and for a fire drill. We know who our team leaders are for cleaning up blood, vomit, and bodily fluids. We’re trained in first aid. But what if someone was in the library with a shotgun?

Maybe my district has such a plan and I’m the one who’s negligent for not knowing it, but as a parent I’d want every teacher to know it backwards and forwards.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools suggests a framework of the four phases of crisis planning: prevention/mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.

They held training sessions this April in Colorado and this May in Pennsylvania, but they only had room for 125 school administrators and personnel.
I believe that our states should offer this kind of training for as many teachers, administrators, and school-board members as possible.

I may sound paranoid or alarmist to some, but I believe that every school board should develop an emergency and crisis management plan and make sure that teachers, staff members and students are a helluva lot more familiar with it than they are with the school mission statement or fight song. Lives may depend on it.

The games people play

When you’re a little kid, you can lose yourself in your own reality do it with as many other people as you can convince to join you just about anytime you want, anywhere you want absolutely for free.

I remember playing for hours with my buddy Ron across the street. We played cops and robbers and we played cowboys and Indians. We’d watch “The Big Valley,” with Lee Majors, Linda Evans, and Barbara Stanwick riding their horses around 1870’s California and then we’d head outside and play cowboys and Indians. Our bikes doubled as horses. Being in Phoenix, there was plenty of desert for pretending in.

Then a new kid moved into our neighborhood. Juaquin was may same age, Ron was like a year and a half younger. Juaquin was half Maracoipa Indian. So we didn’t play cowboys and Indians so much. He’d get sick and tired of always having to be the Indian. It wasn’t any kind of political correctness, it was just friends being sensitive to our pal.

Of course then we’d play CHiPs (after another TV show, about the California Highway Patrol). When we played CHiPs Juaquin always got to play Erick Estrada’s character Frank “Ponch” Poncherello, the cool Hispanic motorcycle cop. Ron and I had to take turns playing his partner Jon Baker, the nerdy white guy. It’s okay, Jon could still jump ramps and wipe-out on his bike, even if he couldn’t get the babes. And after all, we were only seven years old. We didn’t care about being babe magnets, we cared about stopping bad guys.

It seems like no matter who the boys are or who their parents are or whether or not they have any toy guns, boys play guns. In fact, that was what we called it. “Guns.” Just “guns.” Eventually we didn’t call it “cowboys and Indians” or “CHiPs” or “Cops & Robbers,” or even “War” or “Army.” We just called it “Guns.”

Both Ron & my Dads had been in the Marine Corps. Mine was fortunate to be stationed on an aircraft carrier in Cuba during Korea. Ron’s was in Vietnam. Of course we had no clue about what he’d been through or what happened there. But somehow we both knew that killing and dying were bad. Kids know that. That’s why we always had the same argument-

“Bang! You’re dead!”

“Am NOT, you missed me!”

“Did not, I got you! You have to die sometime, you have to let me hit you”

“Did too! You can’t always hit me, people miss in real life, you know! Besides, I died last time, it’s YOUR turn to get shot.”

“Why do I always have to die?!”

So eventually we decided to take prisoners. The really scary part was the brainwashing. I know that in first through third grade or so we had no idea what that meant. Maybe we picked it up from some war movie or overheard our parents talking about re-education camps in Vietnam or about that “Manchurian Candidate” movie. All I knew was if there were more than two guys playing and someone was taken prisoner we’d say we “taught him a lesson” and basically that meant that the player switched sides.

I’m not hypersensitive or paranoid about all this. Boys will be boys. They all play war. Ban all toy guns and they’ll use their fingers or make a rock or stick into a gun. It’s not societal, it’s natural. And I guess I’d rather they PRETEND to shoot Nazis or Communists or bank robbers than light barns on fire or spray paint small animals for real.

The only time my bleeding heart Liberalism bothered me was once when I was watching my girls play among dozens of kids on the Louis & Clark playground in the Mall in Sioux City. A little boy had a brand new plastic toy Uzi machine gun. It wasn’t just that he was playing guns when everyone else was just climbing and tumbling and giggling. Part of it was that he was the only kid with a toy. Everyone else was playing on the equipment, so that was just sort of impolite. The other thing was probably jus that I’m a teacher and ever since the Columbine shootings, teachers are unnerved when they see one little kid pretending to shoot dozens of other kids. It was surreal. But I kept it to myself and didn’t reprimand the little guy or chastise his mom in an indignant manor or anything. I just sat there and dealt with my own chills.

Even girls have some aggressive pretending times. Sticks are all swords, not just magic wands.

“So how’d your day go?”

“So and so hit me.”

“WHAT???” trying not to fly off the handle. “What was going on? Did you say something to make them angry? Did you take a toy they were playing with? Did they just up and hit you out of the blue?”

“No, we were playing Karate and she got the first point.”