SchoolhouseTragedies

MARCH 16, 2001

Covering the schoolhouse tragedies -- after Columbine

By LANA WHITED
ROANOKE.COM COLUMNIST

Every generation marks the turning point in its youth by a significant, usually violent, event. For my generation, it was the assassination of John Kennedy. For my students, it was the shooting at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. In fact, the whole debate on how to stop teen violence now divides sharply as either B.C. or A.C. -- that is, Before or After Columbine. As a CNN commentator noted, Littleton has become "the Pearl Harbor of America's culture war."

The shooting at Santana High School in Santee, Calif., on Monday, March 5, reopened the wounds of Columbine. I don't know whether we've made progress in solving the problems that cause a boy to put a gun in his backpack. But news accounts of the Santee shooting do suggest that our media cover school violence differently After Columbine.

When Erik Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people and then themselves in Littleton, Colo., Time magazine put them on the cover. Their victims made the cover as well, but in a black-and-white border around large color photos of the shooters. Time put Harris and Klebold on the cover again on Dec. 20, 1999, when videotapes the boys made shortly before the shooting were released. This disturbing photo came from a cafeteria surveillance camera and showed the killers carrying weapons.

Newsweek kept the young killers off the cover but ran a full-page color shot of Harris on page 24 and a smaller photo of Klebold on the facing page. Several pages later, an article called "Why the Young Kill" ran with photos of other teens whose schoolhouse violence made them notorious. Psychologists and the more articulate, insightful serial killers tell us that publicity makes killers kill. So it's critical to keep them off the cover.

But even during Columbine, the focus was beginning to shift. On May 9, Newsweek ran a powerful photo of Columbine students physically supporting each other while exiting the school with the superimposed question, "Why?" One of the most widely published photos following the Jonesboro, Ark., shootings in March 1998 showed a woman and her two daughters leaving a victim's funeral. In the month after Columbine, Newsweek ran a package of stories titled "The Secret Life of Teens: How Well Do You Know Your Kid?" Time featured a similar package called "How to Spot a Troubled Kid." This kind of coverage is proactive and socially responsible.

Then, 11 months after Columbine (March 13, 2000), when a Michigan first-grader shot and killed a classmate, Newsweek pictured only the victim, 6-year-old Kayla Rolland, on the cover. The article inside was called "Did Kayla Have to Die?" In terms of how the media cover schoolhouse shootings, the tide had clearly turned.

More than perhaps anything else, teenagers want attention. If they don't get positive attention, they'll seek negative attention. A national magazine cover means instant fame to a young man who feels undervalued and harassed. So it is essential that the media cover school shootings in a manner that does not make celebrities out of killers.

On Wed., April 28, eight days after Columbine, the Today show reported "copycat" threats in 16 states on the previous day alone. At least three of those incidents took place in Virginia, two of them in Roanoke. Between Columbine and the end of that school year, there were more than 3,000 copycat bomb threats, according to the Associated Press. That's five times higher than the norm for that time period. The week after Columbine, 88 percent of Americans told Newsweek they think the copycat effect is real.

If we accept that media coverage of school violence prompts more violent acts, what do we do about that? News is competitive and commercial, so it seems unlikely we'll persuade the media to look the other way the next time Johnny gets his gun. (Most viewers don't want to look the other way, either. The day of the Columbine shooting, CNN set a new all-time high for viewers.)

But in the wake of Columbine, coverage has not continued on the same terms. The Santee shooting made that clear. Time this week featured an artist's rendering of a backpack with a gun sticking out. Before Columbine, I think we would have seen Andy Williams' face instead. Newsweek didn't even put the story on its cover and focused, in a relatively brief article, on how to get students to talk about classmates' threats.

Even more responsible was Time's article "Scorecard of Hatred," inside the issue. This story examines the "warning signs" in eight widely publicized school shootings and 11 situations in which someone who noticed a warning sign notified authorities and probably averted a catastrophe.

Here's an idea: let's make celebrities of young people like the California drug store clerk who recognized her community college classmate in disturbing photos he brought in for developing and called authorities. Unfortunately, Time did not name her, while it did name the young man who planned to take guns and explosives to school. Let's put her on the cover of national magazines. Then, more young people might realize that reporting destructive behavior is helping, not "tattling." Now THAT is a copycat effect we could live with.

Editors must commit to following these principles in covering school shootings:

Don't make celebrities of the shooters. This means keeping them off the cover and the front page. In the aftermath of Columbine, The Chicago Tribune never ran the story on page one. Most young people aren't newspaper readers. If it isn't on the outside of the paper, they might not see it.
Use the wide-angle lens. Give at least equal space to victims and their families' struggle to rebuild their lives. It used to be that murderers were the only people involved in murder cases we could name. Now that media coverage has broadened, we remember the names of victims, too. The families of Rachel Scott and Isaiah Shoals were interviewed repeatedly on television in the wake of Columbine, and locally, locally, The Roanoke Times and roanoke.com's Laura Osborne-Hammond have done a good job of helping us know Tara Rose Munsey and her family.

In the last few decades, as juveniles have committed more horrific crimes, the media have abandoned the traditional practice of withholding their names. Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson were 11 and 13, respectively, when they killed a teacher and four students in Jonesboro, Ark. The only school shooter in recent years who was 18 at the time of his crimes was Erik Harris. Maybe we should withhold these boys' names not to protect them, but to protect us.

The media's coverage of schoolhouse shootings is a critical factor in preventing copycats. It might even be a matter of life and death, as we know now, After Columbine.