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March 25, 2005
Second-Deadliest School Shooting? Who Cares?
Did you notice the that the second-deadliest school shooting since Columbine took place last week? Maybe you heard a bit about it, but the coverage disappeared very quickly. Remember the wall-to-wall coverage after the Columbine shooting? On the surface, there is all the elements of the kind of story that would be endlessly discussed. The shooter might have been a Nazi sympathizer. On his website, he posted pictures of the band Nirvana -- the founder Kurt Cobain committed suicide. His blog certainly expressed his troubled soul:
"16 years of accumulated rage suppressed by nothing more than brief glimpses of hope, which have all but faded to black," he wrote in an undated personal biography on one Web site. "I can feel the urges within slipping through the cracks, the leash I can no longer hold…."In the same bio, he listed his occupation as "doormat," and said he was located in "endless scrutiny, Minnesota, United States."
There is even a hero in the story, a guard who refused to run even though he had the opportunity, and caused enough commotion allowing many students to get away. He was killed. So, why aren't we hearing more of this?
Many Native Americans are also wondering about the silence of the administration:
Native Americans across the country -- including tribal leaders, academics and rank-and-file tribe members -- voiced anger and frustration Thursday that President Bush has responded to the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history with silence.Three days after 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed nine members of his Red Lake tribe before taking his own life, grief-stricken American Indians complained that the White House has offered little in the way of sympathy for the tribe situated in the uppermost region of Minnesota.
And the obvious point:
The reaction to Bush's silence was particularly bitter given his high-profile, late-night intervention on behalf of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman caught in a legal battle over whether her feeding tube should be reinserted."The fact that Bush preempted his vacation to say something about Ms. Schiavo and here you have 10 native people gunned down and he can't take time to speak is very telling," said David Wilkins, interim chairman of the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and a member of the North Carolina-based Lumbee tribe.
Of course, we will soon see a well-choreographed public appearance by the president during which he will read touching words from the tele-prompter.
Posted by zeynep at March 25, 2005 02:18 PM
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Comments
of course Bush said nothing and the media was quiet...the shooter and the dead were not white.
Posted by: joe in oklahoma at March 27, 2005 09:36 AM
You're right, overall, but I will also say that reporting from Indian Country is very hard for someone who shows up in an emergency. What this story shows me is how few reporters have contacts among the Ojibwa, even though it's one of the biggest First Nations on the continent. There are probably a few more who have contacts on Hopi or in the Navajo Nation, but this is what happens when tragedy strikes a place that a) Reporters and their readers do not aspire to living (a la Littleton), b) is in a geographically remote area with no recent big news stories that would give reporters human contact with the locals, and c) is on sovereign Native land. Notice this from the LA Times story you link to:
As the community struggled to cope with its grief, officials with the Red Lake reservation called for privacy and put restrictions on the many non-Chippewa who have descended upon this remote area.
Journalists were cordoned into a parking lot near the police facilities at Red Lake, and several were escorted off the closed reservation for leaving the restricted area.Having reported from Indian Country as a non-Native, I give the press a bit of slack on this one. If anything, the Ojibwa resistance to media invasion has given them a chance to handle the situation far more appropriately.
Wasn't the media orgy at Columbine disgusting? Isn't this preferable?
Posted by: oily at March 27, 2005 02:47 PM
You're right, overall, but I will also say that reporting from Indian Country is very hard for someone who shows up in an emergency. What this story shows me is how few reporters have contacts among the Ojibwa, even though it's one of the biggest First Nations on the continent. There are probably a few more who have contacts on Hopi or in the Navajo Nation, but this is what happens when tragedy strikes a place that a) Reporters and their readers do not aspire to living (a la Littleton), b) is in a geographically remote area with no recent big news stories that would give reporters human contact with the locals, and c) is on sovereign Native land. Notice this from the LA Times story you link to:
"As the community struggled to cope with its grief, officials with the Red Lake reservation called for privacy and put restrictions on the many non-Chippewa who have descended upon this remote area.
"Journalists were cordoned into a parking lot near the police facilities at Red Lake, and several were escorted off the closed reservation for leaving the restricted area."
Having reported from Indian Country as a non-Native, I give the press a bit of slack on this one. If anything, the Ojibwa resistance to media invasion has given them a chance to handle the situation far more appropriately.
Wasn't the media orgy at Columbine disgusting? Isn't this preferable?
Posted by: oily at March 27, 2005 02:49 PM
Hi Oily, I certainly see your point. Still, prominent politicians could have expressed condolences without invading anyone's privacy...
Posted by: Zeynep at April 2, 2005 09:05 PM
Killing chidren is the worst thing in the world...the same in Russia, Beslan.
Posted by: Richardson Stephanie at September 27, 2005 03:34 PM