When I went to college and took a journalism class, well, actually, even before that, when I got my journalism merit badge in Boy Scouts, I was taught the six things that the first paragraph in any journalistic article should have was who, what, when, where, how and why. The first five are easy. You can sum up something in one sentence fulfilling those five requirements. Yesterday Joe Smith was arrested for shoplifting at Acme Supermarket. It makes a nice short blurb for a news report. Simple and quick. Unfortunately, the why takes a bit longer and our culture seems built on short attention span reports. Theres no real substance. No deep investigation. Thats the why part. We sure seem to neglect that. And, truth be told, thats probably the most important part. Seems Joe Smith lost his job, his unemployment ran out, the food bank was empty and his two kids were hungry. He stole a package of bologna. Now, if the news media doesnt ask important questions, how in the world is the public at large supposed to be expected to ask? I looked up a chronological list of school shootings in the US. Just as anyone might do trying to understand something, I did a bit of research. The first thing listed was this: The earliest known United States shooting to happen on school property was the Pontiacs Rebellion school massacre on July 26, 1764, where four Lenape American Indians entered the schoolhouse near present-day Greencastle, Pennsylvania, shot and killed schoolmaster Enoch Brown, and killed nine or ten children (reports vary). Only three children survived. Now, I was an English major, not history. But if I remember right, these two facts are correct: America declared its independence in 1776, but it took another five years to win freedom from the British. That day came on October 19, 1781, when the British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered his troops in Yorktown, Virginia. The Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787, by the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and ratified by conventions in eleven States. It went into effect on March 4, 1789. So.... in 1764 there was no United States. This is how we get wrong facts fed to us. If the report I read got that wrong, how much other wrong data is in it? There were 185 school shootings, according to the article, from 1850 to 1960, 74 of them prior to 1900. Some of the 185 were by uniformed government personnel, either police or military, none of which were civil war related. Obviously, there have been many more per year lately. They are reported with all due respect and observance of the first five rules, but little to no reporting of why. I think the focus of the debate over guns should really focus on the why. Why do students feel so alone and alienated in the world of social networking and media? For that, I have no answer, nor, apparently does anyone else. I do, however ask the question and care about the answer.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 11:02:57 +0000
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