I teach in a public high school in Miami with a student population of close to 4,000 students. Our school district is the fourth largest in the nation, following New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles school districts. The workings of the layers of administration in a school system this large have fallen to charges of corruption from time to time. It seems that the large bureaucracies are susceptible to sticky fingers that occasionally get caught in the proverbial cookie jar. A few years ago, a local news team of investigators broke open a case of corruption involving some coaches at my school who were charged with grand theft. The news report claimed the coaches, along with some administrative assistance, had cooked up a scheme to supplement their income by teaching extra classes after school. The only hitch was the students never attended the classes. To this day, I can talk to people who deny the real truth ever came of the claims but that is not my point. The TV investigative news team that broke the story turned the event into a media circus. Many believe the news media manipulated the law enforcement into allowing news cameras on the scene the moment the teachers were arrested, handcuffed, and removed from the school. We do know that all of the news media was tipped off because the day of the arrests, we had news helicopters circling the school campus overhead and news trucks from every news outlet in town circling on the ground. At a glance, one would think a hundred hungry alligators had made an attack on our students (or something equally newsworthy). For weeks following the splash of this story, our school was in every newscast on every TV station and in every edition of the newspaper. This tremendous attention was directed toward a school that heretofore was invisible to the press and had to beg reporters to cover news of students' accomplishments. All of this commotion was over a few coaches ripping off a few thousand bucks from a public school. I agree it was not right to defraud the school, assuming it really did happen, but the news reporting was beyond overkill.
It seems that the news services love to thrive on hot topics. This became apparent to me with the Karen Quinlan case. For you young folk who missed this, or for you old folk who forgot, this was a case where a girl was declared irreversibly brain dead and the ethical question of the year was whether to remove life support from her so she could be allowed to pass on. This was in the mid-seventies and America was still dragging her heels in the Vietnam War. We were essentially numb to the American death counts our national news anchors were reporting. I was livid at the time because I still had buddies in the war who were surrounded with death and the news could only report on the potential death of this one person. I understand the ramification of deciding to pull the plug on a brain-dead person and I sincerely appreciate the attending ethical issues involved, however, we were hammered with this one case until it became intolerable to watch the evening news. It was obvious that the news media was controlling what America was talking about over coffee breaks and at the drinking fountains.
Other cases have taken all of the limelight from the news cameras and have dominated what we see on newscasts or read in newspapers. I can see that a formula has to be followed and some of this is unavoidable. It is a matter of time and space. The news hour or news half hour has a precise number of minutes to fill. It has to be filled every day. You probably have not seen a newscast stop ten minutes short of the hour or half hour to say that they ran out of news. By the same token, the newspaper always has news from edge to edge. I have not seen a paper yet with a blank white spot caused by a lack of news.
Some other instances of overkill in news reporting that I can recall include the OJ Simpson murder case where they actually preempted soap operas to show America what Juice justice looks like in a real courtroom. We did add the useful word "sidebar" to our daily lexicon, thanks to this case. We were beat to near death with the JonBenet Ramsey murder case in recent time. Some cases spill over to the talk news shows like Larry King where he has a regular panel of guests who hash and rehash the cases until your eyes glaze over. This has contributed to an earlier bedtime for me because after the zillionth rehash, I become hypnotized and do not snap out until the alarm clock goes off the next morning. The current cases that seem to hog up the news shows are the Scott Peterson murder case and the perpetually nauseating Michael Jackson freak show.
I am not positive, but I suspect that the choice of what news story goes in the paper or on the tube is influenced by money. I recall that a major paper countered that during the OJ case, they sold some astronomically large number of additional copies on days they led with his story on the front page, above the fold. If money is what determines what we see and hear in the news, that would explain why only the high society murders get reported and no mention is made of the murders of the homeless and the poor. Although, they may be immune to murder and I am just unaware of this. The money factor is what I suspect keeps some news providers from doing their job. We have a balance of power in the government with the three branches, legislative, judicial, and executive, keeping checks and balances on each other. But it is the responsibility of our free public to inform and to report. Without this ingredient, many have no way of knowing what is truly happening in our society. Having said that, I admit that it is not a perfect system and I can recall seeing news reports that were far from true. Imperfections notwithstanding, I still prefer our system to any other I have seen.
So I have come to the investigative reporters with a question: What are you waiting for? You are sitting on the biggest news story of two centuries and nobody is saying boo. Are you afraid? Are you just too lazy to report it? Do your editors restrict you? Have your employers been bought out and are they preventing you from bringing this story out? Are your organization's owners too afraid of their bottom line to take the risk of upsetting their fiscal applecart? What is the problem? The story I am referring to, of course, is the one about our president and his whole cabal of no-good-nicks who put this country into a war for the purpose of pocketing billions of dollars for their circle of friends and for placating the Zionists who have somehow got themselves stuck in our pocketbook and insist that America continues its biased support of Israel. I am not referring to a war on terrorism because it has been shown quite clearly that Iraq had nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks and in fact would be more likely a target of Al Qaeda as a country to overthrow than as an ally. And the masses can just cool their anti-Semitic attack before it starts. This is a political and legal issue, not religious.
Any person capable of hitting a few keys on their computer can do searches of topics that bring out thousands of statements of fact that incriminate Bush and Co. I am aware that you can find anything and everything on the Internet. I prove that statement to my students by showing them a website claiming that Elvis is still alive. But look at the testimonies, the interviews where the liars are caught in their own web of lies, the exposé's of people who worked on the inside of our government, and the news reports that conflict with the "company line." There is enough ammunition available to expose this corrupt administration for the lying thieves they are. The modern investigative reporter does not have to join the cadre of "Dittoland" press corps. And consider that this kind of investigation is inexpensive. Just think of the millions Ken Starr spent on investigating the Whitewater case and Bill Clinton whose biggest goof was to dribble on a blue dress and then get caught lying about it. Oh, for the days of a stained blue dress. If only…
I hate sounding overly flaky, but some of the goings on at our capital lend well to conspiracy theories. Books are going to sell when this mess is over and I predict their Amazon.com key search words will be "conspiracy," "shadow government," "corruption," and "liars." We should not have to wait for the book or the movie. Brokaw, Jennings, Rather, and Blitzer should be screaming this story to the public posthaste.
Whatever does transpire, the surface area of the newspaper will remain the same size and the TV news program will be the same length. Meanwhile, do not get caught running bogus classes in a public school!
June 19, 2004
