don’t panic

CNN had this to say this morning about a boy who tried to poison his family.

And as you’re reading this article, most of us are probably thinking just what CNN wants us to, or, “this is one seriously sick kid.”

And yes, he probably is sick. You would have to be mentally unbalanced to do this kind of thing. But then I got to the second to the last paragraph and my whole view of the situation changed.

This is a kid who “sleeps on a mattress in the walk-in closet off the master bedroom so they can watch him”. Say what? Why would they need to do that? And what kind of life is that for a fifteen-year-old boy?

There’s a lot missing from this story that we aren’t reading, but it angers me that CNN paints this out to be a problem with a deranged teen, when it has all the trapping of a child pushed to the edge by crappy parenting. If your child is willing to kill you in order to get attention and change their life, then something is seriously wrong with the way you are raising that child, even if it’s just that you are failing to notice a problem mentally whether it be depression or something far more serious.

But a half dozen paragraphs to describe a situation that is obviously much deeper than we are led by the media to believe, is to me, just the same as if CNN had simply lied about the story. It’s actually worse since the way they presented it caused me to be biased in my thinking.

More and more, we are a culture of headlines. We don’t have time to read the whole story. We want everything explained in simple, short, bandwidth friendly one page synopses. We want edited RSS feeds with content filtered to just the topics we’re interested in. We don’t take the time as readers to actually think for ourselves about whether or not we are being driven like mindless cattle by the media; eating whatever they throw in front of us without question.

What’s the point of telling me about this poor kid? Does his predicament, and that of his family somehow effect me directly? Is there any reason I need to know this? Or is this story just fodder for a really great headline so that CNN can sell more page-views to their advertisers?

Perhaps we need to redefine what qualifies as “news”. After all, it’s not like this was listed in the “entertainment” section. This was under “law”. Funny that the word “law” wasn’t mentioned once in the article. Other than the vague point that this boy has now been charged with “intentional homicide” how does this have to do with law? Why aren’t we reading, “parents under investigation for abuse”? They questioned this kid at his school. Why? Why not in his home? Why was it necessary to pull him out of his classes in front of his peers and get him to confess to trying to off his own family? Did the police even ask the parents what led them to believe that they needed to keep him in a closet to watch him? I suspect they did, but we shall never know because that information is missing from the article. It would have pushed it over the one page limit, after all. Never mind that there’s two-to-one more space on the page being devoted to advertising.

I’d say that CNN sucks (they do, but that’s beside the point), but it’s our own damn fault for letting them get away with such crap. After all, it’s what we want.