So were they partly white?
I doubt many PJGuy readers expect me to be the avatar of political correctness, but I find this line to be odd, in an AP story about the school shooting yesterday in Cleveland:
"The school has about 240 mainly black students with a small number of white and Hispanic students."
Yeah, I know, fish in a barrel; God knows I've written enough stupid things myself (the ones I'm paid for, that is). But still, it is our business.
ANd then there's this, which belongs in an article about No Child Left Behind (I say we impeach Bush for that name alone):
"The school, opened five years ago, ranks in the middle of the state's ratings for student performance. Its graduation rate is 94 percent, well above the district's rate of 55 percent."
Unless there's an Ohio standardized test for marksmanship, I'm not sure I quite get the relevance.
Final note: a pro-gun group sent an email around noting that unarmed students are at risk. Yeah, they probably are, but that sort of email isn't any better than what the press and the anti-gunners would normally be expected to do in beating the anti-gun drum.
posted by ColumbusGuy @ 12:13 AM
3 Comments:
I generally agree with CG's scholarly explication of journalistic ethics (even if there is such a thing), I have to wonder if the quoted paragraph actually answered questions that the reading public, politically and incorrectly, wanted to know?- I.e.- Did this incident happen to people like me or in some nasty urban environment with "other" people (from the point of view of the people I saw while commuting this morning). Even if it happened in a predominantly wealthy white suburban school, the demographic causes people to process the story in a certain way. I see the school's graduation rate as being somewhat relevant- i.e. I think you would expect more violence in schools with lower graduation rates (although I don't have the data to back this up) so its a little surprising (maybe the right word is noteworthy) if this is happening in a more academically successful one.
Now highlighting this info to the exclusion of other is more problematic....
The pro-gun group was just following the president's lead in his statement shoring up 2d Amendment support right after the Va Tech slayfest
My favorite stuff in Bonfire Of The Vanities is how they decide to call any youth who's involved in any way in a crime an "honor student."
This would probably help students in bringing around all those prospects and probabilities which must have been understood by the students to proceed further.
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