Friday, February 22, 2008
News / News Bites Mad Gunman Triggers Healing Process
Posted by Michael Miner on 02.22.08 at 09:06 PM
I've noticed three stages to the coverage of the senseless slaughters that are coming at us fast and furious. The first stage begins with the bulletin, and then details are rapidly fleshed out as reporters race to the scene and survivors with cell phones begin transmitting words and pictures. The second stage offers profiles of the victims, the killer, and the community. There will be a story on how easily the killer came by his arms; another will wonder what made him do it. As for the third stage, it looks like this:
"Kirkwood begins healing process" (Columbia Missourian, February 11)
"Kirkwood begins long, slow healing process" (Joplin Globe, February 11)
"Healing efforts continue on NIU campus" (WLS TV home page, February 16)
"Northern Illinois Athletics will join with the rest of the Northern Illinois University community in observing a week of healing . . . " (DeKalb's Daily Chronicle, February 16)
"For NIU, a time to heal" (New Mexican, February 16)
"After hell comes healing" (Sun-Times February 19)
"Grief counselors help NIU staff begin healing process" (Daily Herald, February 20)
The killings at the Kirkwood, Missouri, city hall occurred on February 7, the ones in an NIU lecture hall on February 14. Please note that two days later, WLS was reporting not that the healing had begun but that it was continuing.
I'm reminded of what Bobby Kennedy said to a black audience in Indianapolis the night Martin Luther King was assassinated. He told them what had happened, and he quoted Aeschylus: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
"Drop by drop" sounds like a slow process to me, much too slow for today's media, who want the healing to kick in almost immediately--perhaps so they can move on to another story. It would be a terrible thing if communities like Kirkwood or NIU that felt still shattered a week after their catastrophes blamed themselves for falling short at healing. If King's assassination and its aftermath had been covered by today's standards, would we have seen headlines such as this: "Experts call riots first step in healing"?
Comments (3)
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Well, newspapers are mass media, which means they try to appeal to a mainstream audience. Anyone that tried to write a story beyond the pre-established narrative of "events, profiles and healing" would probably be spiked and/or firing. Could you imagine a writer for, say, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch writing a story probing the Kirkwood shooting from the killer's viewpoint and seriously considering the reasons behind the killer's actions? It's something you might see on an international story, but I highly doubt you'll ever see it in most American newspapers. Although few journalists have enough clout to discuss a controversal viewpoint without losing their jobs, I tend to think the three-stage narrative is actually due to a general lack of philosophical inquisitiveness on the part of both writers and editors. The worst offenders in this regard always seem to be the sportswriters, who rarely break the heroic "mono-myth" narrative as filtered through a Judeo-Christian value system. (Mitch Albom comes to mind as one such offender.) Then again, I could be just talking out of my ass. I'm sure there are several excellent counterexamples to my points out there. This is the Internet, after all: all is wrong, nothing is right.
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