Troubling Reflections on the 10th Anniversary of the Columbine Massacre
By Ed Martin TV / Video Download Archives
The column reprinted below first appeared in The Myers Report on April 21, 2004, five years after the mass murder at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. As I read through it this morning, on the 10th anniversary of the massacre, I find that I still have many of the same questions and concerns that I expressed back then.
True, children and teens now pass through metal detectors as they enter many schools, and even the most casual comments made by kids about bombs, murder and other violent acts are given greater weight than before by parents, teachers and school administrators. But the entertainment media that targets young people today is more violent than during the Nineties, a decade that brought with it an unprecedented number of school shootings and endless speculation about possible connections between mayhem on the screen (especially as it is glorified in movies and video games) and madness in the schoolyard.
If a school shooting of this magnitude were to take place in 2009, I am certain that many of the young people under siege would be texting and twittering the details of their ordeal and might save lives by doing so. (It is impossible to determine how many lives were saved by students sending texts during the Virginia Tech massacre, which occurred two years ago this month.) Others would record videos of the horror as it played out and, later, post the uncensored footage online for all to see. (Significantly, broadcast and cable news networks and other traditional media would still be pressured by internal and external forces to use discretion in reporting the carnage even as such uncensored content reached a much larger audience on the Internet.)
Another thought on this dark anniversary: Isn’t it fascinating that at no time during the last ten years have we seen photos of or read interviews with the parents of Eric Klebold and Dylan Harris, the two teenagers who killed and injured so many kids before taking their own lives? I’m not suggesting that the Klebold or Harris families should be forced to do anything, including talk to the press. I’m just wondering how they have so thoroughly avoided the media, especially in recent years, when the paparazzi are seemingly unstoppable, when anyone with a cell phone or mobile digital device can become a citizen pap, and when bloggers can write anything they want and go to any extreme they wish without worrying about the basic tenets of journalism?
Columbine Remembered; Fears Forgotten?
By Ed Martin
First published in The Myers Report on April 21, 2004
Special coverage on the broadcast and cable news networks yesterday marking the fifth anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, brought back vivid memories of events on that terrible day in 1999. It also reminded us all that so many questions relating to the tragedy at Columbine remain largely unanswered, even in this era of unprecedented media access and information flow. As questions surrounding the 9/11 Commission hearings, the continued military efforts in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq also make clear, even as we watch historic events play out one day at a time via the cable news networks, the Internet and other media, and despite all the information at hand, we often know very little at all.
So it is with Columbine. Five years later we still ask: Why did the local police ignore passionate pleas from the Brown family about threats against their son Brooks and the violent content on a Web site created by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two teenagers who would take the lives of 12 students and one teacher and severely injure at least 23 others before killing themselves? How could the parents of Harris and Klebold not have known about the arsenal of weapons these boys were hiding in their homes and the bombs they were making? Didn't their sons ever appear unusually agitated and angry or remote and unreachable? Their problems didn't manifest themselves overnight. How could police and SWAT teams stand outside the high school for over three hours, refusing to enter the building while hundreds of teenagers - the children of their community - were under bloody attack inside, and while beloved teacher Dave Sanders, a true hero that day, lay slowly bleeding to death? (Compare their actions to those of the hundreds of heroes in New York City and Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11.) Who, exactly, bullied or tormented Harris and Klebold so severely that they would eventually resort to such blind horror? Were there other triggers that launched their killing spree?
On April 22, 1999, I noted in The Myers Report that the Columbine tragedy raised a host of media-related issues. Five years later, my concerns remain relevant, if overshadowed by the new reality of terrorism and homeland security.
I wondered: "Were the trench coat-clad killers influenced by death-driven video and arcade games or by such successful feature films as The Terminator, The Basketball Diaries and The Matrix, in which leading characters who wear long black coats and produce weapons from within them function as veritable killing machines?" In the months that followed, the impact of guns and, notably, media violence on young people were foremost on people's minds (until John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife and her sister died in a plane crash later that year and the media shifted focus). Such concerns have since died down, while filmed entertainment, on big screen and small, has become even more violent and more readily available via collectible DVDs and Internet downloads. Meanwhile, our elected officials and their appointees have chosen to focus instead on the inherent hazards of bared breasts and bad language.
I asked: "Did the perpetrators learn how to construct the bombs they planted in and around Columbine High on the Internet?" Many others asked this question as well, and worried about the implications of such unprecedented access to dangerous information. (On the day I wrote that column, Star Jones on The View noted that it took her exactly 42 seconds to access such information online.) I also wondered if the Trench Coat Mafia, the group of troubled, outcast young people to which Harris and Klebold belonged, had recruited members online, and if its Web site had offered clues, weeks earlier, of the carnage to come. The Internet was still new to many people in 1999, its growth still in full surge, and such questions were topical and alarming. They seem less bothersome today, perhaps because Columbine has receded in our collective memory and news organizations no longer focus so intently on incidents of school violence.
But these questions remain as relevant as ever. At the end of a report about Columbine on Dateline NBC Sunday, anchor Stone Phillips revealed that there have been over 40 deaths related to school violence nationally during the current school year. I can't recall hearing about one of them.
In my Columbine column I also said the following: "We've all become accustomed to the unfortunate reality of news crews descending on victims of newsworthy events. [At the time I was thinking primarily of the residents of Oklahoma City in 1995, the memory of that massacre still fresh.] But it was especially disturbing to see so many traumatized kids in front of cameras, especially on [April 20], shortly after their escape from the hell of their high school's hallways, answering questions on news networks and becoming fodder for all media worldwide. It was also somehow unsettling to see so many of those same kids make the rounds the following day, from the Today show and Good Morning, America to Oprah, with countless stops on the 24-hour news networks in between, to field further questions about their awful ordeal. Any one of them could have died the day before. Why, then, weren't they home with their families and friends? Certainly, they satisfied news producers' needs, as well as the needs of viewers who were glued to the tube, eager to learn as much about the tragedy as possible. But it doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that those kids, and everyone around them, should at that time have put their own needs first."
I don't mean to sound at all flippant, but the concern I expressed on that day now seems somewhat antiquated. As the rise in reality television programming on broadcast and cable since that time has revealed, it appears that almost everyone now wants to be on television in one way or another, even if they have to lie, cheat, strip, eat bugs, undergo massive plastic surgeries or reveal painfully intimate personal information in order to do so. Today, it would be noteworthy if those touched by "newsworthy" tragedy didn't plunge into the media machine.
Ed Martin
Ed Martin is the chief television and content critic for MediaVillage. He has written about television and internet programming for several Myers publications since 2000, including The Myers Report, The Myers Programming Report, MediaBizBloggers a…
