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As our children return to the nation's schools over the next few weeks, I am increasingly concerned that some in the media may exaggerate or overdramatize the issue of school violence at the expense of the best interests of students, teachers and parents. Columbine High School, which had to endure its own searing moment of national attention several months ago, is already under a new media siege as the young people in Littleton, Colo., prepare to go back to school tomorrow.
Clearly, the tragedy at Columbine and the other multiple shootings in our schools over the past two years are newsworthy and deserve our full attention. But as young people prepare to go back to school filled with the excitement of a new year, do they really need to see endlessly repeated images of past tragedies that remain extraordinarily rare in our schools?
The 24-hour news channels, the emergence of online media and increased competition among various media outlets can feed this frenzy to replay searing images at the expense of the victims and communities still struggling to rebuild their lives. As a parent and grandparent, I am as troubled as anyone over the senseless tragedies that have occurred in schools over the past two years, and I fully understand the gravity and attention these scenes deserve. However, it does little but instill unwarranted fear in parents and students when such graphic stories are repeated over and over despite the telling fact that schools remain one of the safest places for our children to be.
I encourage and respectfully ask the media to allow the young people who will go back to school at Columbine High and across America to do so with the hope of a new school year rather than the fear of last spring. The Littleton community has been working hard to knit itself together, just as school systems around the country have been working to prevent future tragedies. I urge the media to respect these efforts to help children get the education they deserve. America's schools can always be made safer,and the tragedies of the past two years have created a new level of vigilance in every school district in America. This is no time to rest easy, and the media have every right to report on what schools are doing and not doing to safeguard their students.<...
Freedom of Speech & Censorship on the Internet Introduction With more and more frequency the newspapers are reporting instances of school children distributing disks of pornographic images which they have downloaded from the net and recently a university student was found to be operating such a site for material. On November 11, a...
Abstract For those of us located within the United States, we often take or granted the nornal day to day business operations. Though the United States has a mix of several distict cultures, most companies operate in the same manner. In fact, Americans often make the mistake of assuming that standard business models are the norm in...
Tobacco Ads Target Youth Everyday 3,000 children start smoking, most them between the ages of 10 and 18. These kids account for 90 percent of all new smokers. In fact, 90 percent of all adult smokers said that they first lit up as teenagers (Roberts). These statistics clearly show that young people are the prime target in...
The inequality of people has gained the attention of the media lately. Yet common people prefer using a dollar for something totally useless to giving it to charity. This is surprising, because that dollar could give a poor child foor, slothing and vaccination. Perhaps people in the industrialised countries think these charity aids are needless, be...
Introduction ?Marriage involves a number of legal rights and duties. If a man and woman live together as husband and wife but are not legally married, the legal consequences may be different from those arising from a legal marriage.? (www.liv.asn.au) The length of a de facto relationship can help to decide wills, intestacy, pr...
