And everybody was happy

Like most Americans, I’m still mentally processing the terrible shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., yesterday morning, and this will be far from my last word on the subject. (For starters, it IS the time to quote “talk about this,” meaning policy changes that could prevent this type of mass shooting in the future.)

But I read this tonight – it’s making its rounds on the Internet – it’s from Roger Ebert’s review of the film “Elephant,” which is also about a school shooting:

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

In my previous jobs, I worked at two private colleges and a private secondary school, and one of my top responsibilities was working with the media. I have all the respect in the world for newspeople and the critical work they do, but after a few years at it I got pretty frustrated with the media’s tendency to focus on stories that could be reported on as quickly as possible and result in the max amount of attention. As they say, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Anyone who watches TV knows that.

But what got me was the superficiality of the media’s interest. I got to the point where I knew that if there was a disaster anywhere in the world, my day (at least up until the 3 p.m.-ish deadline for a 6 p.m. broadcast) would be taken up answering calls from each area media outlet wanting to know if we had any students from the affected area – even better if we had students there right then. Once I was at a conference away from campus, and on a break I noticed that I had three voicemails – as it turned out, from three different TV stations wanting to know if the school had any students studying abroad in Chile. And that’s how I found out that there had been an earthquake in Chile. I found out about the London bus bombing from a reporter, too, only that time my mom was one of three adult students in my school’s summer program at Oxford, so while I’m on the phone with this reporter I’m also frantically checking my email to see if there was anything from her or the other students.

And after each day spent answering questions about members of our school family potentially in Chile, in Oxford, in Japan, in Haiti, in wherever, almost never was there any follow-up. Those media outlets were running down a checklist of local colleges, and that was all they needed to do. They filled that day’s broadcast and everybody was happy – on to the next disaster.

Yes, we need to understand what happened yesterday and pay tribute to the victims. But that’s only if we can discover some lesson that will prevent future horrors. Sticking microphones in the faces of children who’ve just survived a mass murder doesn’t accomplish that. Digging up yearbook photos and Facebook profiles of the shooter doesn’t, either. Speculating about the effect of video games, movies and anything else irrelevant really doesn’t. But I guess it fills the time.