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When a school massacre isn't Page 1 news
The Chicago Sun-Times draws praise for its decision to bury the Springfield, Ore., story inside the paper. BY LORI LEIBOVICH | When 15-year-old Kip Kinkel opened fire on classmates in the cafeteria of his Springfield, Ore., school Thursday, killing two students and wounding 20, the gruesome story made national headlines almost immediately. Following on the heels of recent high-profile school killings in West Paducah, Ky., and Jonesboro, Ark., the Springfield shooting was one of the top stories on TV and radio and was splashed across the front pages of the nation's papers. But not the eighth-largest metropolitan daily in the country, the Chicago Sun-Times, which ran the story on Page 2 and 3 of Friday's edition. "Front-page treatment could have harmed or frightened vulnerable children," said a note to readers. The editors argued that because the story wasn't local, and coverage of it might spur copycat crimes, it was unnecessary to highlight the gory details on Page 1. "It was a question of editorial judgment, of balancing news reporting responsibilities against responsibilities to society as a whole," said Nigel Wade, editor in chief of the Sun-Times. "The overriding concern was for children and for their safety. My thought was, gee, it's starting to look awfully like there's a feeding frenzy going on here with the media coverage, and I didn't want to be contributing in any way to the phenomenon." The Sun-Times has never kept a news story off the front page because of its content. In fact, the killings in Jonesboro were featured prominently on the paper's cover. Wade said that his decision to hold off on the Oregon killing also had to do with a recent Chicago-area incident in which a student was arrested for plotting to ambush kids at his high school. "I thought, wait a minute. This is a delicate situation," Wade said. "I just thought, let's play safe, it's children we're talking about here." According to Wade, he has been receiving calls and e-mails all day from around the country praising him for his decision. Several press critics contacted by Salon also supported his action. "I applaud the Sun-Times," said Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. "The newspaper's job is to report stories of significance, not to just report anything that happens." Schell said if he were the editor of a newspaper he would have run a full-page story, not a tabloid-style exposé but a "thoughtful discussion" about the various school shootings and "what they come out of, what they portend and what they mean" -- and he wouldn't run it on Page 1. "Having more bodies piled up on the front page may sell papers, but there is a great distinction between selling papers and news of significance. I mean, if you can't cover a massacre in Rwanda where a half-million people have died on the front page, then in the grand scale of things a wacko teenager hosing down his classmates with an automatic weapon is not of more consequence." "It certainly caught my attention when I saw Page 1 and didn't see that story," said Mary Dedinsky, former Sun-Times managing editor and now associate dean of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. "When I was at the Sun-Times and we had suicides of young people we would be very careful not to glorify or play it up too much because of the copycat potential." In his note to readers, Wade said that if the shooting had occurred in the Chicago area, the paper would have carried the news on the front page -- as did the Sun-Times' rival, the Chicago Tribune, along with the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. "It's a laudable but largely symbolic effort to resist the knee-jerk urge to splash every violent tragedy on the front page," said Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz. "But the notion that this small act of self-restraint might prevent others from going down the violent path is wishful." The Sun-Times sells many papers out of the news racks, according to Dedinsky, so people glance at the headline and often decide whether to buy the paper based on that. "The Sun-Times was making a statement that they didn't want you to buy the paper that day for the headline of a student killing and wounding other students. They didn't want that impulse to be why you bought the paper." Luckily, another attention-getting story was unfolding locally: the story of the $104 million jackpot collected by an Illinois couple was splashed across the front page. "I would assume that some of the decision [not to run the story] was trying to avoid a copycat crime, but it probably was also made in the context that they had another story that they thought was a pretty good seller," said Dedinsky. But what about the busy commuter who only had time to glance at the front page and would then miss one of the biggest stories in the country? "That commuter, assuming he went all day without knowing about it, would have had to miss the note on the front page, which was marked with a red banner," said Wade. Some might argue that this kind of editorial judgment might lead newspapers down a slippery slope. Should suicides such as that of rock star Kurt Cobain not be reported on the front page, for fear that teenagers might follow suit? Will newspapers stop running ads for explicitly violent films because the films might incite violence? Should the interests of children be discussed at every editorial meeting? "I'm stopping with this specific sequence of schoolyard incidences. That's what I'm focusing on, I'm not making a policy that extends to any other kind of story or influence," said Wade. "This policy is in connection with the particular pathology of school shootings." The Sun-Times did not renege on its news responsibility, insists Kurtz, adding, "If all stories like this were played down, it might not be a bad thing."
Additional reporting by Dawn MacKeen.
Violence or entertainment? A new book on our cultural obsession with violence finds kids' TV and Quentin Tarantino movies inseparable from the Roman spectacles.
Nice Guys In the wake of the Arkansas schoolyard killings, a mother ponders guns, children and the adults who bring them together.
Making sense of Jonesboro Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint says that blame for the school yard murders ultimately lies with Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden, but our violent society isn't making it easy to be a kid.
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