Real Name: Thomas Martinez Gender: male Date of Birth: May 17, 1968 Member Since: March 01, 2008 Last Signed In: September 28, 2008 Profile Views: 210 Blog Views: 1066 The great comics survey Quiet before the storm Are newspapers objective? Death of newspapers? Nah How to cover a community? Race and the media A brother's suicide My love of newspapers Out of the comfort zone A special night March 08 April 08 May 08 June 08 July 08 August 08 September 08 October 08 
RSS 2.0    |
|
|
Race and relevancy in reporting continues to be a fine line that most newspapers walk. A story we published on Wednesday stirred the debate in our newsroom. In general, do not use race/ethnicity in a police description. What does this mean: Police are searching for a big, tattooed Hispanic man ..... Take this from noted diversity expert Keith Woods (a link to his full essay is included below): What, for example, does a Hispanic man look like? Is his skin dark brown? Reddish brown? Pale? Is his hair straight? Curly? Course? Fine? Does he have a flat, curved nose or is it narrow and straight? Telling the public that he’s 5-foot-8, 180 pounds, with a blue shirt and blue jeans says something about the person’s appearance. But what do you add to that picture when you say Latino? Ask police to get more specific. What other details can you include? This following example of a description is a little better because it has very specific details, and does not indict any specific ethnicity. Police are looking for a dark-skinned man with dark, short hair, about 6-foot-3, with a tattoo of a butterfly on his arm. He was wearing blue jeans, and a black T-shirt and he escaped driving a black Lexus. We, as a leader in the community, have to be careful not to indict a whole group of people. We have to be sensitive to the strong power of our words, our language. By saying police are looking for big Hispanic man with a tattoo, we probably just included about 5,000 innocent people into the mix. Any questions, please see an editor. Thanks. Again, it's a fine line. We want to give as much detail to the public as we can, but we also want to be as exact as we can. Some accuse newspapers of being too politically correct.
A couple of days ago, we ran a story in the Advocate about rival girl gangs in Calhoun County. Police arrested members of one of the gangs, a mother and grandmother when things escalated.
A reader posted a comment to that story about zero tolerance at schools, and how maybe zero tolerance has hampered educators in their dealings with some students. That reader's post was interesting and well thought out. Though I'm not sure I agree with it, it did get me thinking about zero tolerance. I was working at a newspaper in Colorado when the Columbine shootings happened. Eric Harris and his sissy friend Dylan Klebold gunned down 12 students and one teacher and wounded 22 others before killing themselves. Cowards. Anyway, a lot of the current zero tolerance policies were born out of the Columbine shootings. Does it always work. No, but nothing's 100 percent. A few years back, a newspaper I worked at told the story of a young kid who got expelled because he had a plastic knife in his backpack. If I remember correctly, he had mistakingly put the plastic knife in his lunch sack. That expulsion definitely didn't fit the crime. But zero tolerance probably does more good than harm. In the case of Calhoun County, it probably worked because a heated exchange between gangs -- even wannabe gangs -- could have easily escalated into an out-of-control chaos that hurt other students or teachers. What's your take on zero tolerance? Please comment here or click the link above and comment on the original story. Thanks for reading.
When I moved down to Texas, I really hoped the legal driving age would be 18. Of course, as you know, it isn't.
But as my son approaches 16, I worry more and more about it and whether I should let him get a driver's license. When I lived in Greeley, CO., Weld County consistently led the state in the number of highway fatalities every year. Many of those deaths were teen drivers. Seeing first hand the impacts of those deaths in the stories we reported and wrote was gut wrenching. Stories like the one we published today don't help, either. We ran a AP story and a local side bar about how car crashes are the leading cause of death for tweens and teens. Boy, how I wish the legal driving age was 18. I think those extra two years are huge in regards to how much more kids mature and develop. I remember back to the my early driving days. I realize now I wasn't ready to handle the responsibility of driving. I actually earned a speeding ticket the first day I ever drove alone without an adult. I know there are some kids out there who can handle it. But the truth is, at least in my opinion, most aren't ready. As a parent, I can make my son wait those two extra years. Will I? I don't know, but it's a conversation worth having. What do you think? Click on the link above and post your thoughts, or post them here. Thanks. |