No Worries

There is a saying to the effect that there are no stupid questions. As much as I understand the sentiment, there are times when I'm inclined to disagree. Mainly, it turns out, when journalists are interviewing someone and they ask, about one or another topic "how worried should we be?"

I understand the impetus behind the question. But I think that it indicates that fear is, in and of itself, an appropriate or useful response to things.

Katherine Wu, over at The Atlantic, summed up my feelings on the matter when she was asked "How much should we be panicking [about the Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant] right now?" Her answer: "Not at all. It’s never time to panic. It’s counterproductive. Reacting wisely and reacting sensibly and using the tools we have is always the best move." And I'd like to see more journalists take this tack in general. Rather than asking experts how frightened the public should be, they should be asking what actions the public can take, or what actions the public should be pushing their governments to take. And if journalists don't change course, maybe their interview subjects should.

I'm going to admit that I'm not terribly familiar with the genre of news that's been billed "Solutions Journalism," but I suspect that to the degree that it actually focuses on the solutions to societal problems rather than simply flogging what continues to go wrong, that it can't be any worse than the old "if it bleeds it leads" model. Since reactions that are wise and sensible are often in the eye of the beholder, the expectation that Solutions Journalism will focus on things that have been demonstrated to work is welcome. People can, and do, argue with results, but results give more to argue with, and for, than opinions about what should be done.

What will really drive a turn towards Solutions Journalism, or at least away from fear-mongering, is public demand. And, more than likely, the demand just isn't there yet. But if the news influences the public as much as people often say it does, maybe they would do well to lay the groundwork for a better product.

A Narrower Focus

NPR recently ran a story titled: "HBO's 'Black and Missing' offers an antidote to Missing White Woman Syndrome." The HBO series follows the work of The Black and Missing Foundation, Inc., as they attempt to bring more media coverage to the many non-White people who go missing in the United States in any given year.

At the end of the piece, one of the documentary's creators, journalist Soledad O'Brien offers eight ways of changing the media dynamic that leads to "Missing White Woman Syndrome." And they're fine for what they are. But it occurs to me that maybe something else (or something different) is needed.

Letting local stories be local stories.

The NPR story lists four cases as representative of the problem: Gabby Petito, Natalee Holloway, Elizabeth Smart and JonBenét Ramsey. These were all national stories. Perhaps it's worth asking "why?" There's an implicit assumption in discussions of Missing White Woman Syndrome, which is the assumption that more news coverage is likely to lead to some sort of better outcome, whether that means someone being found before something serious is done to them or a perpetrator being arrested and tried for the crime.

But I suspect that a lot of what feeds into Missing White Woman Syndrome is the understanding that these are stories that can gather attention (and thus, advertising dollars), but don't really use much in the way of local resources. If the Associated Press or ABC are offering up stories that people in the local news market will want to see, why bother reporting on less-interesting local items? Perhaps it would be worthwhile to look at a number of these stories as the exploitation of people's lives for the sake of easier ratings. I, for example, live just outside of Seattle, Washington. There was no reason at all why I needed to know anything about the Gabby Petito case. No law-enforcement agencies in the area needed to be spurred into action by the fact that she hadn't been found. Her story made international headlines because it was salacious, not because it was useful to an international audience. Violence against women and girls may very well be something that concerns everyone, but many of the individual stories that are trotted out as newsworthy would be just as well served if they only spread beyond their local areas in the aggregate.

When more than six hundred thousand people every year are reported missing, expansive nationwide coverage of even a small fraction of them would take up quite a bit of time. If it doesn't add anything of value, why bother? There's a section of the story headed "Forcing the world to see those long ignored," but there really isn't any way to force that. And if "the world" isn't the right audience, what does forcing them to see random people actually do?

...In One Chart

I don't know that it's as much of a problem as people make it out to be that partisans look to their counterparts on the other side of the political spectrum when they are searching for monsters. What is a problem, I suspect, is their unwillingness to rest until they find one.

While I knew a lot of obnoxious people when I was younger, it dawned on me fairly early that they weren't motivated by malice. It took a few years longer, but I learned to extend that understanding of people to broader and broader groups, until my default position was that no-one, or almost no-one, ever acted simply out of some love of evil. And I'll admit that I take a certain amount of flack for that. For some people, there will always be monsters in the world that wear human faces.

As negative partisanship becomes more and more prevalent in the United States, it appears to feed on itself, as partisans not only whip up fear of the other, but take the fact that speakers on the other side are whipping up fear as proof of malevolent intent, and thus, a reason to be afraid.

A politically-engaged acquaintance of mine noted that as Democrats and Republicans grew more convinced of the need to defend themselves from some existential threat posed by the other, the nation was at risk of plunging into open conflict.

"That won't happen because people will be too quick to defend themselves," I replied. "It will happen because someone will decide that the best way to defend themselves is to shoot first." And to the degree that partisans do actually see one another as brainwashed, hateful, racist monsters, they're also likely to see one another as too much of a threat to be allowed to act first.

Keeping Dry

The Seattle area has a pretty significant number of homeless people, and at no point is this more evident than during the rainy season - especially when it actually rains, rather than simply drizzles. Mainly because I don't live in Seattle itself, lot of the homeless people I come across are transient; I'll see them in one spot one day, and maybe see them in another place a week later, or maybe I never see them again. But they don't manage to take up residence somewhere stable, where one might expect to find them week after week. At least, not nearby to where I live. The photograph doesn't really show it, but this was a fairly wet morning; it was terrible weather to be living out of doors without a tent.

I suspect that the man's choice of location was quite deliberate and well thought-out. He wasn't far from a pedestrian underpass that would have done a pretty adequate job of keeping him warm, but it would have also placed him away from the retail area where the people were. The next time I drove by the area, he was, as I expected, gone. I doubt that I'll ever cross paths with him again. But there will be someone else. There always is.

Equal Injustice

Now that Kyle Rittenhouse has been acquitted, the recriminations have begun. Those, and the protests that will follow the verdict, are unlikely to change anything. Part of the problem is that the legal system in the United States isn't really structured in a way that allows it to treat some people unjustly simply because others have been (or will be) treated unjustly.

When someone is on trial for homicide, and their defense is self-defense, the examination of events tends to concern itself with the act and its immediate antecedent. Jack does something threatening, and Jill shoots him, so the focus of the trial is on Jack's action. Jill is more or less automatically assumed to have done nothing that would have warranted Jack seeking to kill, injure or disarm her. The racial history of the United States, however, has demonstrated that this presumption of innocuousness, is not granted equally to all people. And so when people point out that a Jill were Black, she wouldn't be treated as if she'd simply been minding her own business when Jack mounted an unprovoked attack, they're drawing on that history.

But the legal system does not. And it is unlikely to anytime soon. As much as I understand the problems that people have with verdicts like this, and the legal system that produces them, the problem isn't that Kyle Rittenhouse got away with something. It's that the legal system doesn't do enough to ensure that other people in his situation, but who don't happen to be White, are given the same set of supports that he was.

Laws, and I suspect that this is the case everywhere, are not simply about keeping the peace and protecting rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They're also about assuring people that the Good among them will prosper and the Evil among them will be punished. And people's general understandings of Good and Evil are suspect at best and wildly self-serving as a general rule. And this makes the law into a weapon, to be used against those who are different in a way that make the whatever segment of the society that becomes the mainstream uncomfortable.

Kyle Rittenhouse owes a great deal to the fact that he's not considered to be an ongoing threat to mainstream society. Society, therefore did not feel the need to assuage their fears by throwing the book at him. It's a less formal sort of innocence until proven guilty. The problem that activists point out is, in effect, that many Black people have already been "proven guilty," often simply by association, in the eyes of society at large. But putting Kyle Rittenhouse behind bars would not have changed that.

There is quite a bit to be said for legal proceedings taking a more expansive view of the events leading up to a homicide that is then claimed to be in self-defense. The current habit allows for too much thoughtless, if not downright aggressive, behavior. But that's a different concern than whether the United States, as a nation, can do enough about the deep-seated fears and prejudices that so many people harbor, and can't simply be made into felonies.