Fellow blogger Esbee sends in the following question or questions:
Ken, are you open to suggestions for what to discuss? Because I’m very interested in why the print media seems to be so intensely focused on the Amish schoolgirls who were killed, to the point of snapping as many pics as possible of their funerals and mentioning every intimate detail they can grab a hold of, while the accompanying text almost always mentions how much the Amish dislike having their pictures taken, want to live privately as much as possible, etc.? It seems more than slightly disrespectful, especially since the previous shootings, including the one where the girls were sexually assaulted, haven’t generated the same print media… “fixation” is the best word I can come up with.
Please note that by print media, I mean in general. But since I can’t ask the print media in general, but I maybe can ask you, I’m doing so.
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We had a discussion yesterday at our afternoon story budget meeting about the art for the Amish funerals and whether to use photos that showed the Amish. Being respectful and being disrespectful are not always opposites. The Amish don’t like to have their photos taken, yes, but at some level, a funeral is a community event and I think a larger group of people than the immediate families wants to share in the grief. There were a lot of photos available, none that I would call outstanding. What I’m drawn to in the shot we used are the sunglasses of the young man on the left. They seem fairly hip and stylish, a little intrusion from the outside world that the Amish try to keep at arm’s length and to me symbolic of some larger themes.
I think America and by extension the media have had a love affair with the Amish for years. There’s also a lot of fascination, envy, jealousy, and skepticism thrown in as well. It’s that whole Witness thing. The Amish are presented as honest, hard-working people with these beautiful fields who have turned their back on much of the technology we take for granted. Do they really not have cell phones? computers? DVD players? How can their kids function without IM? We joke that they have to be cheating somehow, raiding the technology refrigerator at night, so to speak.
And while the Amish have been trying to live this pious and simple life of worship, farming, and buggies, the world is closing in. Land prices are up. Temptation is everywhere. The moat isn’t what it used to be. The school shootings of the other day are unfortunately the perfect symbol of the Amish inability to seal off their “better” world from our world of Columbine and 9/11. They’ve failed, and so have we. And if a crazy man can kill five girls in a one-room schoolhouse set among farmland so pretty that it makes you cry, then God help the rest of us.
Point is, it’s a great story on many levels, and newspapers and the rest of the media love great stories. And the privacy that the Amish hold so dear, that they don’t want to weep and grieve in public, makes them that much more noble and the story that much better. I think some papers/TV stations have gone a little overboard, but in many ways it’s more interesting than the House page scandal.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
Thank you, Ken.
The story in the Journal, for example, which I well realize was taken of the AP wire and not written by a Journal reporter, says “During the slow trip to the funerals, the clip-clop of the horses was broken only by the sound of official helicopters enforcing the no-fly zone.” Clearly, a lot of thought went into how to keep the media at a distance. And yet news outlets I usually respect tremendously, like the Washington Post (link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2006/10/02/GA2006100200948.html?referrer=emaillink ), have pictures of coffins being carried to a grave, as well as pictures of buggies surrounded by photographers, as if they’re taking notes from the papparazi. Great effort was gone to to even capture the image of a child in her coffin, a child whose entire belief system shunned photos of her in life, a child who can’t do a damn thing to escape the camera in death.
The accompanying articles always note that the Amish will fill in the grave - gasp - by hand! It seems like certain details - that one and the open coffin! one and the please touch the body, sister! one - are being reported over and over and over as if we should all be titillated by those weird Amish.
It just seems wrong. Really, really wrong. The story may well have been intriguing initially, but the level of scrutiny to which these people are still being subjected has indeed passed into the arena of “disrespectful”.
***crickets***
I guess my questions were quite “yesterday”.
I do understand your point, Ken, about Americans’ love affair/fascination with the Amish. I just feel that using this tragedy as a get-to-know-your-Amish-better learning exercise was opportunistic of a number of media organizations.
I think the Journal did a good job of not crossing the line by overly reporting the funerals, but a number of highly reputable publications lost a little integrity in my eyes by doing just that, both in the level of details in their articles and in the overage and closeness of their photos. If nothing else, other organizations should be very aware of that distinct possibility when choosing to what degree to continue coverage of stories that aren’t really still developing.
The funerals served as closure for a very specific community, and we are not part of that community, as much as we might like to be. It’s just gauche to demand to be a part of it when we don’t demand it the other 364 days of the year.
Sorry so wordy. Can you tell I feel strongly about this? I’ll drop it now since I’m clearly the only one.
It’s OK to feel strongly about things. And it’s OK to question how the media does things. My sense of what’s happened in the past generation is that there’s been an addition to the 5 Ws that defined journalism (who, what, when, where and why). No. 6 is “what it means”, which is surely different than just plain old what or even why. So we look for symbols and flash points and tipping points. Readers want to know the larger context of events. Sometimes, of course, they’re obvious. Other times, they’re more subtle. And sometimes, the events have no larger context, the cigar is just a cigar, and that’s where things go astray, when folks want to pin context to an event that doesn’t deserve it or require it. Anyway, that’s all for now.
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