Next week will mark the 10th anniversary of the tragic mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. Yesterday, USA Today published what should be an instructive piece on how badly our media can and often do misreport events. Simply, almost every element of the initial narrative of that tragedy was wrong. And many still believe myths that were spread in that initial narrative. Is there any way to prevent this media mythmaking? I'm not sure, but I'd like to think so.
More below the fold....
Columbine - A Lesson in Bad Reporting
I'd meant to write about something else today, but Springoff the Fourth brought a USA Today article to my attention as I was driving him home from his carpool yesterday. It's an important story because it should tell us a lot about how unreliable initial media reports often are. As we often leap on those reports here at DKos - pro or con - it's probably worth asking whether we should pause and fact-check, as best we can, before we climb on or kick at those bandwagons.
Simply, almost all of the initial reporting about the Columbine High School shootings was wrong. The ways it was wrong should be a lesson to all of us, both in the mainstream and internet media. Too often we sift breaking news events through our political filters, looking for evidence to support our opinions or undermine opposing opinions. And a lot of the time, as at Columbine, much of that "evidence" later turns out to be myth.
What didn't happen:
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were not goths, members of a "Trenchcoat Mafia," or bullied outcasts. They didn't "just snap," and their parents were not cluelessly unaware of their problems. They were not acting out a scene from The Matrix, nor were they motivated by violent video games or music. They did not target athletes or blacks. The oft-told story of the girl shot because she refused to renounce Christ is a complete fabrication.
In fact, unless you've kept up with the story since the original reports - including since Michael Moore's excellent film Bowling for Columbine - most of what you "know" about the Columbine shooting is probably wrong. Moore is a brilliant filmmaker, and I'm not criticizing his work. More facts have been released since the film was made, and arguably many of those facts were investigated or released because of the film. Moore exposed some but not all of the myths, and his film was not intended to be solely a chronicle of those events.
A key paragraph in the USA Today story is this:
"These are not ordinary kids who were bullied into retaliation," psychologist Peter Langman writes in his new book, Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. "These are not ordinary kids who played too many video games. These are not ordinary kids who just wanted to be famous. These are simply not ordinary kids. These are kids with serious psychological problems."
What did happen:
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were very different young men. Harris was, arguably, a sociopath. He could get good grades and charm adults, yet he believed himself to be a god-like, superior being whose journal reveals he held others in contempt. Klebold was depressed, a suicidal romantic who drew hearts in his journal and believed his life "the most miserable existence in the history of time."
The two spent over a year planning what they hoped would be an Oklahoma City-style bombing, killing friends and real or imagined enemies alike. They had no political or ideological goal. Perhaps the best explanation is that a random idea - "Why don't we blow up the school?" - was not dismissed as such ideas usually are, but was instead nurtured by their sharing planning of and preparations for it. The rationales in their journals change over time, according to what had happened in their lives most recently. It's a mistake to read those rationales as reasons, because the two boys were rationalizing a random idea.
We all have those random ideas. A blip of thought flits across the mind. Most of us let them pass - often with a horrified shudder - as quickly as they arrive. If we ever recall them, it is usually only to wonder how so bizarre an idea could ever have bubbled up from our minds, even for that brief instant. They don't feel like "us," even in that instant when they happen. Arguably they aren't "us," if by that we mean thoughts we derive and embrace as an act of induction or deduction. You could call them "brain belches" and not be far wrong.
But Harris and Klebold didn't let their "brain belch" pass. They seized on it, embraced it, nurtured it, discussed it, wrote about it, planned it, prepared and trained for it, and carried it out. Part of that was to collect and trade rationales for it, but those rationales were collected and traded to sustain and justify each others' continued commitment, not as exercises in inductive or deductive reasoning. Simply, the only "motive" is that they never decided not to act on that "brain belch."
Their parents knew there were problems. Some of their teachers and classmates knew there were problems. Even the police knew there were problems; both Harris and Klebold were on probation for auto burglary. What no one knew, or could have known without reading their journals, is what the two were planning. No one who knew the two imagined they were capable of something so horrific. Who would or could, when the act at its core had no narrative apart from a random idea nurtured into a truly senseless tragedy?
What also happened:
But the media quickly gave it a narrative. In the cited article, writer Greg Tioppo aptly describes it as "a giant national Rorschach test." The media, politicians, and various interest groups leaped on the story, all too willing to provide villains, victims, heroes, and themes ... coherent story elements in a story that was fundamentally incoherent.
It was not much different from inventing a story to explain a series of dice rolls - and rumors about unseen dice rolls - and for that reason the events lent themselves to almost any story someone wanted to tell. Too many guns in our society, or not enough. Racial or religious bigotry. The dangers of bullying. The over-emphasis on school athletics. Modern music, movies, or video games. The wheel of events was rough enough to grind almost any axe.
Because it was a huge, emotionally gripping event, there were plenty of broadcast hours and column inches to be filled, and plenty of "experts" ready and willing to fill them with "analysis" that was usually little more than ideological hyperbole mixed with baseless speculation. It was as if the reporters reached for a three-ring binder labeled Stories To Tell And Experts To Call After A School Shooting, and proceeded to work through every story and expert in the binder. Fill-in-the-blank reporting.
It was as if, because in fact that's exactly what happened. There may not be a three-ring binder, but it exists in the collective memories, Rolodexes, PDAs, Blackberries, clip files, and video vaults of reporters and editors.
We saw it happen again two years ago tomorrow at Virginia Tech, when Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and then himself. In the days following, you could have sworn the reporters did little more than perform a global find-replace on names, locations, and dates, then reprint file stories from Columbine and other school shootings before and since. If the stories seem the same, it's less because of any factual sameness than the sameness with which they're told. Pull out the Stories To Tell And Experts To Call After A School Shooting, and work through the list.
If most of it turns out to be myth, well, that's what anniversary retrospectives and eventually historians are for. Except by then, the myths have stuck and often will never be displaced. But in an era when reporters are cost items on a ledger sheet and ratings matter more than reality, fill-in-the-blank reporting is the best we're likely to get.
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Happy Wednesday!