Shared Responsibility

In the wake of the Amish schoolhouse shootings, several other school shootings, and the local Dawson College tragedy here in Montreal, Maisonneuve MediaScout published a brief but appropriate editorial today questioning the role of the media and society in this rash of multiple, horrific crimes.

If you scroll down further in this daily compendium of lead stories in the Canadian press, you'll also find a discussion of press reaction to the overpass collapse - in this case (as I usually think is true) the media are playing their role responsibly and vigorously by doing investigative research, publishing the evidence, and insisting on accountability and action. The Montreal Gazette, apparently, sent photographers and reporters out all over the city and is publishing photographic evidence of decaying concrete highway structures - making a case that's hard to refute, and informing the public so that they can also insist on action.

I am totally against governmental censorship of the media, but I do believe that responsible self-censorship woudl help avoid fanning the flames of overreaction and violence. We've seen the lack of this in the anti-Islamic cartoon issue earlier this year, and it seems to be a perennial contributing factor in cases of copycat violence. Every paper in Montreal ran screaming headlines and photos of the Dawson College killer, as well as detailed biographies. I can only imagine how the story was covered on American TV. Who are the people sitting in editorial offices today? How do they feel, I wonder, about their decisions of what to publish, and what not to publish, or how much play to give a particular story? On the other hand, with free access to the internet across the globe, is the cat so far out of the bag now that we simply have to live with the consequences of instantaneous reporting, lurid detail, and the desire - in an increasingly impersonal and alienated society - for brief moments of "fame" which occasionally turn very dark indeed?

Comments

[Joerg Colberg]

Maybe it's really not such a good idea that everything is for sale, or everything is just about how much money can be made from it. There are certain things where that doesn't make sense - for example utilities or mass transportation. Or the media. The original idea of the media - and their most important role in a democracy - was (and still is) to inform about what is happening, and not to spend most of their time on superficial crap or sensationalist stuff. But then there isn't much money to be made with actual information, and it's just easier to peddle superficial nonsense.

[marja-leena]

"perhaps it’s our own modern, media-saturated society we should be worried about" - that hits the nail on the head! And what Joerg said. I really believe that we need to look at gun control again.

[steve westby]

I agree with your thoughts on the media. Yet I also feel that the "shared responsibility" goes deeper than just the media. I mean, if the media situation was fixed, and they spent less time on sensationalistic news, I doubt that violence would simply go away -- or even lessen that much.

Don't get me wrong, the media plays a role. But a far more important one it seems to me is with each and all of us. We have such a vital responsibility, it seems to me, to foster peace, love, and acceptance in ourselves, in our children, in our loved ones, and in broader society.

In my job I see parents who love their children fostering hatred, either because they fail to control their anger or because they pass on various bigotries to their offspring. I see arguments between couples become destructive, angry, and blaming -- because they are too fearful to be vulnerable with each other. I see cycles of pain, anger, and loneliness perpetuate across generations of families for various reasons and in various ways.

[Peter]

Mmmm. How to find a gentle way to disagree about something I'm passionate about? It's just not possible to roll up a distaste for coverage of a horrific story into a general conclusion that the "media" should censor themselves -- or more politely, should make decisions with an eye to the "effect" of what they handle.

Now, my opinion surely isn't objective, because news is my bread and butter, but I believe that pressing responsibility on the "media" -- I put quotes around the word because each medium is culturally and economically different from its competitors -- generally boils down to a requirement that decisions be based on who'll be offended.

Once you go down that road -- and most outlets based on advertising are somewhere along it already (read the auto pages) -- you start skipping stories because they're too much of a headache, or because some friend of yours will argue about what you said, or because some friend of the boss's will be upset. And the audience never finds out what picture never got taken, or what question never got asked.

If the New York Times or Washington Post had been more aggressive in questioning assertions about Saddam before the Iraq war, would anything be different now? What else are we already missing? And how could any of the media covering the recent shootings fail to try to find out something about the persons who committed them and try to explain why the outrage happened? Or fail to find out about the victims as human beings?

Now, if you find a nodding, eyebrow-raising, emoting TV personality distasteful, the thing to do is recognize bad taste and do something about it. Google "Carl Monday" for a look at what happened to a reporter who made a fairly disgusting subject into a heavy-hitting investigative series, descended into unintentional self-parody and became an object of ridicule. A complaint on the level of taste -- appropriate public behavior -- is fair game and something a decision-maker can learn from without, one hopes, deciding to overlook torture in prisons as a response.

In any case, the proper response to offensive voices or ideas is more voices. The idea's the basis of the blogoswamp and, for better or worse, it works.

(That said, I should add that there is some consensus about avoiding a few things that give more pain than information: The names of rape victims, for example, and suicides where there's no other news connection.)

One sad, last point: Schools are vulnerable to people with guns. Actually, every institution less well guarded than a federal reserve bank is vulnerable to people with guns. Every year, there are a few shootings, some more horrific than others. Most shock the region and are forgotten, but some stand out, like Columbine or the ones in Colorado and Pennsylvania. In some of these, it turns out that if the people around the gunmen had paid close attention to them, maybe reached out at the right moment and given them some mental alternative to the suicide they're planning, they might, just barely might, have prevented a tragedy. Or not. The human mind is so complex that when twisted, it becomes unfathomable, to the media as well as everyone else.

Thanks for listening.

[Beth]

I'm glad readers found this post provocative! Thank you for all these comments. I agree with those who said that the fault lies primarily in society, and in us, and Peter, I'm especially glad that you rose to the defense of the media and gave us an inside look. Steve, thanks very much for your thoughtful comment, especially the last paragraph which points precisely to a major root of the problem.

I would like to ask another question: sensational crimes have always been reported in lurid detail, if not by the mainsteam press, then by the tabloids or some other outlet. But this sort of violent crime against schoolchildren, for instance, seems relatively new. Is it a product of the growth of highly-public terrorism tactics like hostage-taking and hijacking, which were relatively rare when I was young, anyway? Is it because of greater helplessness and alienation in the face of impersonal society? Is it because of easy access to guns? How much of it is media driven, in the sense that the perpetrator knows he or she will become (in)famous, with their picture and the story of their alienated life splashed all over telelvision screens and newspapers worldwide? What has changed, do you think?

[Joerg C.]

I certainly do not believe that the media are to blame for the violence - even though I'm not sure how much it helps that the media are oversaturated with violence. I mean it does mean something when some people seriously think that torture isn't all that bad since it works on "24". There definitely is a debate missing, and yes, I do blame the media for that. Congress just decided to get rid off habeas corpus for foreigners, which many people consider to be the worst piece of legislation in literally hundreds of years, but I'm still missing the media diving into that. I have no high hopes that this is going to happen anyway, especially since now, we're all upset about that Congressman who liked internet sex with teenagers. Now THAT is a real problem!

I think in the end, only society as a whole can be blamed, and especially this ever-more pervasive atmosphere of violence. If you look left and right, violence is pretty common. For example, people find it more or less normal that "nerds" get beat up in school. I mean this isn't even debated. Or football, a "sport" based on violence, is popular. No questions asked there, either. And if you tell people that football is centered on violence, they tell you that other sports are violent, too, like ice hockey. The thing about that is, though, that if you take away the violence from ice hockey you get ice hockey (the violence actually violates the rules). If you take away the violence from football you get... nothing. There's nothing left.

And add to that all the free availability of guns, and you are where we are now. People say "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." - almost correct. It should be "Guns don't kill people. People kill people with guns." because that's the main point, and quite a simple one (one that is being understood by Europeans, say, and it's not because they're snooty).

So here's a simple test: Let's see how much the media will debate whether the easy availability of guns contributes to those school shootings. I kinda know the answer already, but I don't want to be a cynic. If that question isn't seriously debated, the media are not doing their job properly, and they are to be blamed for that. It's as simple as that.

[Peter]

If 20 years or so is "new," schoolyard atrocities seem new to me, too. I remember being shocked by the story of a guy who shot up a playground in California in the '80s -- it was one of the incidents that led to people trying to ban assault weapons. Before that, I can't remember, either because the incidents weren't there or I didn't hear about them. Incidents of kids bringing guns to school seem to come up several times a year, but most of them don't end in anyone being hurt, so they don't make a big splash. It's not solely an American phenomenon; in 1994 someone killed 16 people at a school in England.

One possibility is that there are 300 million Americans, and among that many people with access to guns, there are bound to be a few very sick ones.

Another possibility is that our generation's willingness to tolerate bad taste on the grounds that art and expression should be free has merely led to a raising of the bar of what's atrocious. I wouldn't ever argue that there's a connection between flags on the lobby floor, or that infamous "Piss Christ" photo from first Bush administration, and roaming gunmen, but there might be an indirect one between extremely violent movies and video games and over-the-top killers.

Such a person might not even be directly involved with the "Reservoir Dogs" or "Grand Theft Auto" scenes. But could it be possible that an environment exists that makes the unthinkable thinkable? That's only in the West, too: For several years we've had to deal with videotaped beheadings and acts of wholesale slaughter in the Mideast and Africa. Even accounts stripped of their shock value have an impact.

A third possibility is that the evil has always been there, waiting for the means and the opportunity and a burst of insanity: Massacres of and by Indians. Gang wars. The Holocaust. Recorded history is drenched in blood.

But I think I remember reading that murder rates have actually fallen over the centuries. Even in recent years, killings have fallen somewhat -- somebody's going to point out something I've missed, I'm sure. There's a fourth possibility, that there really isn't a trend at all.

At bottom, I think Steve put the whole problem and the whole solution in his one succinct post: self-restraint, civility and peacefulness are the sort of thing that you learn at home, or at least are that are taught one individual at a time, by other, decent people. Given such lessons, guns and artificial horrors are irrelevant. More power to him in his work.

[butuki]

I'm wondering if it has something to do with just too much information. Never before have we been able to access and switch between so many bundles of information. It is so much and so fast that I don't think the human brain has the wherewithall to either process it or deliberate it. The further you go into the past the more time people had to think about things and perceive their consequences, because progressively there was less information barraging them. When things start coming on so fast that it streams in like something unreal, perhaps even the senses cannot latch onto anything substantial. Seeing events like the New York tragedy or Lebanese/ Israeli war on TV, in endless waves of images and sounds and disconnected, incongruous comments and influential music all intercepted by commercials and weather forecasts and switching to drama on other stations and the dissonance of the comparatively peaceful continuance of daily life and on and on and on... at some point the brain shuts off out of sheer need to get a hold of itself.

I don't think wars like the First or Second World Wars could have escalated the way they did without access to information.

And perhaps, too, the blinding innocence of children becomes unbearbale when held up to the light of such baseness and corruption; surely a sensitive soul might break under the weight of such disparity? I know in my own heart how much the rage that the acts of the American government stirred up has pushed me to react and say things all out of proportion to who I really am, or even truly feel about Amerca and Americans. My solution was to pull far away from the news and information that was irrelevant to my personal sense of balance. I still cannot bear to watch, even for a second, the visage of Bush on the television screen. He represents all that I most despise and when I do catch snippets of him or his words, something in me goes numb and a mindless fury instantly reacts. I have to rein myself in and distance myself as far as possible from any exposure to such ugliness. Nothing else in my life has ever provoked such fury and isiagreement as Bush and what has happened in the last five years. The events and attitudes have seared my life.

It is like pornography... until you come across it and see what other people have allowed themselves to do, most people probably never even imagine some of the vulgarity that passes for creativity. Back in high school I went to see a movie with some friends here in Japan. When the lights went down and the previews came on, the screen played excerpts from a real snuff movie, something that had been filmed in Venezuela, which was very popular in Japan at the time. I will never forget the scene taken on a bridge, with the camera zooming in on a woman tied up and strung from the bridge's frame, and a masked man approaching her with a knife. Right in front of the camera she was stabbed to death. Her screams and the horror and anquish on her face remain indelibly seared into my mind. I vomited in my seat and, ignoring the sniggering of my friends, I fled the theater, never to go back there again. Even today, when I pass that theater the images come back and I have to walk past as fast as I can.

That is what exposure to such images and information does. Though they seem insubstantial, no more than suggestions of the real world around us, they also mold the fabric of our minds and how we react to the real world. Knowledge and exposure to new ideas are not always benign and constructive. Sometimes they tear away the fabric of sanity.

[Joerg C.]

I think what we really want to do is meaningful comparisons. Historical comparisons always help little - especially if the same usual suspects are being dragged from the usual closets. Mentioning the Holocaust doesn't help at all, that's just absurd.

Maybe it's easier to find out about the state of the society we live in by comparing it with those that are most similar to ours, like the Europeans. Most Europeans' living standards easily match - and often exceed - those of the ones found here - and the simple question is: Why is violence in European societies so less pervasive? Pointing out that there are occasional outbursts of violence in Europe btw is meaningless again. What we also have to learn - especially the media! - is to avoid picking the most extreme events and trying to deduce anything from those. So for the US, a massacre at a school - it seems - is really just normal now - but it is an extreme in Europe. Why is that? THAT we have to find out, and we have to be willing to ask meaningful questions. It's really not all that hard to do - but I bet it won't get done. Don't count on the press (oh, and they're busy with that Congressman anyway).

[Beth]

Well, all I can do is compare the U.S. and Canada, in my limited experience of the latter. But there are some significant differences. One of the main ones is that there is considerably less of a gap between haves and have-nots, and people in the lower economic brackets have roe of their basic needs met. As a result, there is a lot less anger at the government or the nameless "powers that be;" the individual tends to feel less helpless than in the U.S. The society is less violent for sure, with fewer guns. But I feel that a major difference contributing to that is that it is far less militarized. When you are supporting a vast military and waging war, the projection of national power in a violent way - turnign killing into a totally legitimate way to solve problems - this seeps into society at every turn. Soldiers return and enter into the disconnect of "normal" American society but at great cost to their physical and emotional health - the military reports greatly increased domestic violence and divorces among the ranks of the enlisted, but this is not talked about widely. I don't think there is any question but that war and militarism influence entertainment - films, television, video games - which are in turn increasingly used by alienated people as a means of escaping normal reality. Butuki is right about the way violence affects us; those images and descriptions are tremendously powerful and unforgettable. And they are now "normal" - this is all new; when I was young, children simply didn't see these things portrayed so graphically.

In Canada, this is changing with the pervasiveness of American pop culture, and as we saw recently, there are alienated people here too who move into that shadowy world. But when tax money is being spent primarily on social programs that actually benefit people and contribute to their daily lives, rather than supporting a military machine, it actually does affect the society at large.

Dysfunctional families are often that way, it seems to me, because one or more of the adults cannot cope with life, and try to escape by using drugs, alcohol, retreating into obsessive TV-watching or video-playing; becoming verbally or physically abusive. Suppose someone notices and tries to help. Is mental health care covered by insurance? How about substance abuse treatment? Do the individuals in question even have access to insurance? These are major differences between societies - and where they put their priorities. Those priorities are not hard for people to figure out and to feel; and they are bound to react with a sense that the society is just and fair, and that they have a legitimate place in it, or not.

That's not a complete answer, but it's a part of it.

[Joerg C.]

More to think about: "'The predominant pattern in school shootings of the past three decades is that girls are the victims,' says Katherine Newman, a Princeton University sociologist whose recent book examines the roots of 'rampage' shootings in rural schools." (source: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1004/p01s01-usgn.html). And is it just me or are those lunatics who go on such killing sprees always young white men?