More Death; Bullying Still Irrelevant

In light of the subject of my post yesterday, it’s truly remarkable that I happened to click onto this NY Daily News’ story about Monday’s shooting at a school in Chardon, OH. One paragraph below a picture of the shooter, T.J. Lane being ushered into the back of a vehicle in cuffs, the author writes, “Prosecutors on Tuesday described Lane, 17, as ‘someone who’s not well,’ and rejected claims the violence stemmed from him being bullied.” Since I’d practically just gotten through criticizing the irresponsible overuse of the term “bullying,” my first reaction to that line was, naturally, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

This is two egregious applications of the same media buzzword on two consecutive days, one extraneously denied as a factor in a young girl’s death, and the other extraneously denied as a factor in a teenage boy’s commission of murder. I really hope that my having read both of these stories is coincidence, and not a result of the media being so saturated with the bullying narrative that it’s this easy to find awful examples of its misapplication.

So the prosecutors in the Lane case rejected claims of bullying? I find it interesting that the author points that out but makes no note of from whom those claims came in the first place. Was it other students? Lane himself? His parents or his teachers? Was it a contingent of the public that has no connection to the case but has heard a lot from the media about the spectacular effects of some bullying epidemic? Or did the media itself float that assertion to prosecutors so they would have reason to print the denial?

Wherever the claim came from, it points to the fact that the media obsession with the concept of bullying has led at least some segment of society to readily jump upon bullying as the easiest explanation of virtually any problem among children or teens. The obsession didn’t seem quite so endemic yesterday, but when the same buzzword is presented as the most likely cause of both victimization and victimhood, there’s a good chance that the narrative has a really pervasive influence.

The farther the term reaches in absence of evidence for the appropriateness of its use, the less meaning that term retains. If bullying was initially seen as the probable cause for a girl being killed yesterday, but today it was seen as the initial probable cause for a boy killing his classmates, it’s hard to conclude anything other than that the explanatory use of the concept is arbitrary. If it can work in either direction, why didn’t UPI say yesterday that there was no evidence that Joanna Ramos was attacked because she was bullying the other girl? Why didn’t the Daily News ask defense attorneys whether Lane had targeted the three dead students because they were the victims of his bullying?

Unless the media can explain to me some nuanced justification that they’ve applied, I’m going to assume that in one case the story was already focused on Ramos and in the other case it was already focused on Lane, and the author of each piece had to leverage the bullying buzzword in somehow.

I understand the need that many people have to make sense of tragedy, and these narratives help people to do that more quickly and easily. But the same narratives compel people to make sense of tragedy inaccurately and incompletely. The media’s enablement of the impulse to grab the most uniform explanations and the let the stories lay does no one any good. In fact, the news media has a responsibility to discourage those impulses and to provide us with information that is thorough, accurate, and relevant, even if it complicates our understanding of the world.

I suppose I should give credit to each of these articles for actually dispelling the bullying claim, but the fact remains that there was no reason to raise it in the first place. Doing so just serves to tie these and other such stories together in a very tenuous way. That just muddles our collective understanding of these events as what they are – separate, distinct, but equivalently awful tragedies.

UPI Exploits Death Again - This Time it's a Little Girl

I’m quick to grow painfully tired of media buzzwords. Their overuse tends to strip them of all legitimate meaning. It takes a small-scale breaking point for the public to realize this in individual cases, but it will take a major breaking point for the media to recognize the counterproductive effects of their attention-seeking repetition.

I’ve noticed this recently with the word “bullying.” Frequently, when there are stories about children or teenagers who were victims of violence, harassment, or suicide, or who were subject to practically any interactions on the internet, the news media leverages in some sort of comment about bullying, seemingly in an effort to give unifying context to virtually every such story. That wouldn’t be objectionable, but it seems to me that “bullying” is a descriptive term that we apply to a situation only after we’ve identified it as such. If a child is being systematically harassed by a person or group of people, we say that he’s being bullied because that’s simply what the word means.

But that’s not the way the media uses it. Instead, they tend to talk about bullying like it is some kind of disease, which has a very specific set of symptoms and can be identified at any stage in its life cycle by a trained professional. Indeed, the disease corollary may be quite intentional, designed to make modern bullying seem less like an ordinary phenomenon and more like an epidemic, and thus something about which to feel a certain sense of panic. Applying it as a buzzword reframes bullying so that it’s no longer a term that concisely identifies a set of similar situations; instead it is the situation.

Never has the manipulative use of the term been clearer than in the UPI news brief about the death of ten year-old Joanna Ramos after a fight at a Southern California elementary school. The article summarizes the story in a few brief paragraphs, explaining that she and another girl had fought, that she suffered blunt force trauma that resulted in a blood clot in her brain, that her death has been ruled a homicide and that prosecutors have yet to determine whether charges will be filed. Then, after all the details of the actual case have been conclusively stated, UPI adds this as a concluding sentence: “There have been no allegations that Ramos was being bullied, KTLA reported Friday.”

If there have been no such allegations, then why on Earth is that relevant to the tragic story of a young girl being killed? Does her being or not being bullied affect the seriousness of the loss? Does it make her any more or less dead? Does it make the girl with whom she fought any more or less guilty of manslaughter? The only reason there ever could be for pointing out the absence of a particular charge or connection is if that piece of information would have been relevant. In this case, it just isn’t. It might have mattered, for the sake of complete coverage, if the girl was being bullied, but there’s no need to specifically dispel that possibility every time a child is killed. To do so is to suggest that bullying is typically a precursor to death among children and that the absence of bullying in this case is anomalous and therefore noteworthy.

Again, I’m sure that’s intentional. Actual relevance is the only legitimate reason for addressing the absence of allegations, but the media has reasons for that behavior that aren’t legitimate. If it’s a chance to leverage in a buzzword that they think their audience is expecting, that’s evidently good enough for them.

Bullying is a problem. It’s always been a problem. Using it as this catchall term in the media, though, cheapens that problem. It broadens awareness of the issue to the point of obfuscating recognition of actual instances of it. Isolated acts of violence constitute their own problem. And using a girl’s death from such an act in order to push your narrow media narrative is cheap, tactless and unethical. But considering that UPI is the same outlet that exploited Andrew Embiricos’ death back in December, cheap, tactless and unethical is evidently par for the course for them. They don’t set the overall media narratives, though. Everybody’s culpable for that.

The Better of Two Hyperboles?

Ordinarily, I have great respect for Media Matters, but there are times when their partisanship completely overrides their message, and with each such instance they are incrementally losing my admiration of their work. It’s fine if your political leanings influence your narrative so that your criticisms have a tendency to focus on one group rather than another, but only if the skewed perspective fits your narrative. I understand if you miss some things because you were busy peering closely at the opposite side of the aisle, but there is never justification for twisting your narrative to fit your partisan loyalties. That is exactly what the organization did with the Media Matters Minute yesterday.

The latest installment of the sixty second daily update mentioned that North Carolina governor Beverly Perdue had said at a meeting of the local Rotary Club that Congress should postpone elections in order to focus on the economy, rather than campaigning. I assumed that that meant she was the target of the day’s Media Matters criticism, and that when they said that a spokesperson claimed she was just using hyperbole to illustrate a point, that they would reject that assertion. Quite the contrary, they apparently took that for granted, and proceeded to indicate that “right wing blogs were not as forgiving.” Gee, no kidding? Bloggers who make careers out of opposition to Democrats and liberals didn’t shrug their shoulders, shake their heads affably, and forget all about the woman in the opposite political camp who just said that it might be a good idea to play fast and loose with the foundations of our democratic system?

Media Matters, would you have been so forgiving if Ms. Perdue had carried an (R) next to her name, rather than a (D)? It’s not as though the reason they were willing to give her that pass while the right wing blogs weren’t was because they thought the proffered defense was a good one. The way they concluded the minute makes that perfectly obvious. No one, they pointed out, took the nasty criticism of the stupid, unreflective Democrat farther than Rush Limbaugh, and to prove that they played a clip of him stating that her idiotic suggestion characterized the Democratic Party, and that, “far be it from me to [draw any connections or comparisons], but Adolph Hitler would agree with Beverly Perdue.”

See, Media Matters, you’re losing a large share of my respect now because you’re putting me in the awkward position of having to defend Rush Limbaugh. It’s not as though I think his commentary is any more measured or any less foolish that Governor Perdue’s poorly-thought-out rhetorical suggestion, but the fact is that if you want to defend one and not look like an utter hypocrite, you have to defend both. Rush Limbaugh was engaged in hyperbole. If a spokesperson for him had any good reason to defend the right wing blowhard against your criticism, he would tell you just that: that he was exaggerating in order to make a point. His hyperbole was far over the top, irresponsible, and intellectually deficient, but so is suggesting that we arbitrarily postpone the democratic process. Apparently Media Matters felt that the fact that Ms. Perdue probably didn’t mean it literally was reason enough to deflect criticism away from her. Why was it not good enough for Limbaugh?

Media Matters, please decide what you stand for, because if you mete out your criticisms this selectively, it’s not for accountability in media. If there are rules for what people are allowed to say on the air, they need to apply universally. Either nobody is allowed to say something ridiculous then bullshit their way out of admitting that they ever uttered it or nobody is. I don’t mind if your ulterior motive is to see that your side wins the game, but I care deeply about how you accomplish it. And you’re not going to get anywhere by trying to establish a harder set of rules for one side than the other. It belies your confidence in the truth and virtue of your favored politicians if you imply that they can’t win in a fair contest of ideas.

California: Teaching Discrimination Through Good Intentions

Shortly after I heard about the new California law mandating the teaching of gay and lesbian contributions to history, I heard that it had passed largely along party lines, and then it was pointed out that many Republicans objected to the bill on the grounds that it required the teaching of subject matter that “many parents may disapprove of.” Really? That was the primary argument against it? The opposition didn’t discuss the bill’s possible effects on the quality of education? No one objected to it on the grounds that it cheapens the presentation of history, or that it ridiculously supplants existing laws against discrimination in textbooks and teaching? No one thought to consider how the law would be enforced, and argue against it on the basis that it might make the writing and publication of decent textbooks substantially harder by cluttering them with absurdly irrelevant content? The major argument against a law mandating that educators reference the sexual orientation of contributors to history and that they leverage in such persons where such contributions are not evident or sexual orientation is not known was that it might make some people uncomfortable?

After signing the bill into law, Governor Jerry Brown remarked that “history should be honest.” Well, no kidding. I heartily agree, and so I’m genuinely curious as to whether Governor Brown really believes that the best way to make history honest is to impose artificial requirements onto what must be taught in any given subject. You see, in my view, whether the cause is noble or not, mandating a specific narrative in history is not honest education, it’s propaganda. By contrast, laws preventing discrimination in education, like the one that has just been overturned, are better positioned to promote honest education, because far from imposing a narrative on history, they work to prevent any such imposition. I’m an extremely liberal guy, but I don’t think it’s any more beneficial to skew the presentation of history in favor of my worldview than it is to skew it in the opposite direction. There are two roughly equivalent ways of limiting children’s understanding of history: You can gloss over aspects of it that don’t fit the rhetorical narrative you want to convey, or you can wedge in elements that do, regardless of their actual significance, historical relevance, or unbiased truth.

The unfortunate truth about American history is that property-owning, married white guys have always held a hell of a lot of power. As a consequence, though, they’ve done a lot of great stuff. That shouldn’t be grounds for blacks children, gay children, poor children, or girls to conclude that their role in history yet to be written won’t be just as significant, but I think there are better ways to convey that belief than by making such efforts to demonstrate the role of people like them in history that they impair their understanding of the progress that society has made.

I’m not implying that there haven’t been enormous contributions to history from gays and lesbians, or any number of other minorities. Certainly there have been, but presenting a particular kind of agent of history should never take precedence over simply presenting history as we understand it to have happened. The sexual orientation of a particular historical personality is usually not relevant unless, say, their historical contribution is in the area of gay rights. The sexual orientations of many historical figures are simply not known. Will California teachers and textbooks now be expected to go out of their way to assert that this long-dead person or that might possibly have been gay, or will they have to search all the back pages of history to find those who we know were? There is plenty of speculation that Abraham Lincoln and William Shakespeare were gay, but there is no way to retroactively prove that assertion, and besides, it doesn’t really matter.

In light of that, this new law is in danger of having the opposite of its intended effect. Specifically delineating the contribution of gays and lesbians – as if they stand in contrast to normal people – only serves to solidify the impression that they are a separate class of people, with their own culture and history, which the government must officially force into the existing narrative. But within a narrative that prohibits exclusion of any class of people without decreeing that they must be represented regardless of the extent or clarity of their contribution, it doesn’t matter whether a person was gay or straight if he signed the Magna Carta or fought in the Civil War, it just matters that he contributed to history. If we avoid discrimination, rather than teaching to it we can present historical figures simply as people, not as sub-classes thereof. And then any child in the classroom, whether gay or straight, white or black, can believe that he or she too might play a similarly powerful role in history, because he or she is just as human as they were.