Comments on: Let’s play “What’s Wrong with This Headline?”

By: Man shoots women: just another “dog-bites-man” story! : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 16:12:53 +0000

[...] and the perverse linkage between masculinity and violence (especially gun violence), see here, here, here, and here–commentaries on incidents of men killing women and their own children, and [...]

By: Kenney

Kenney — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 16:52:57 +0000

The outrage about domestic violence expressed here is valid, and you don’t need me to validate it for you. What’s misguided and unjustified, however, is to point to a news headline as complicit in what may well be a national mental health crisis. It’s simply this: You cannot convict a person in a headline or in a news story until a court has done so. You cannot (at least, not without subjecting yourself to potential legal consequences, such as a libel complaint) identify someone as a murderer or even killer before the judicial system has had a chance to determine that as truth. Even in John Ashcroft’s America, a person was entitled to due process. So, correct though the labels you’d like to see applied from the get-go may well turn out to be, publishing stories about violent crime, domestic or otherwise, call for reason and prudence. Refocus and redirect your anger toward other institutions (the law, the schools, the churches, etc.) that coddle male killers and even create the environment in which they kill at, virtually, will.

By: Obscuring Violence Against Women « mirabile dictu

Obscuring Violence Against Women « mirabile dictu — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 02:49:09 +0000

[...] See the esteemed Historiann, here for “another sickening example of the news media doing the work of our culture in erasing [...]

By: Daddy knows best! : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:48:01 +0000

[...] Je repete: “Where are the articles about this disturbing epidemic of violent husbands and unnatural fathers? (Just imagine if one or two women in this country every week gunned down their husbands and children. Just imagine the headlines, the non-stop media coverage, and the endless analysis if it happened even once!) Why isn’t this considered a national public health emergency?” [...]

By: Historiann

Historiann — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:38:28 +0000

Right–or we can pretend that the boogeyman lives somewhere else, and could never be our friend, neighbor, or child.

By: life_of_a_fool

life_of_a_fool — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:19:54 +0000

Susan’s example also touches on another aspect of this. In some ways, I think the “domestic” piece makes it sound worse, not less bad, precisely because we want to believe that our homes and families are safe. It’s the boogeyman/stranger/Other on the street that we need to fear, not our father, husband, boyfriend, etc. So, when something happens that challenges that, it seems that much more horrifying.

Then again, my own reasoning partially falls apart when thinking about rape — there, stranger rapes confirm our fears of boogeymen, and there must be something exceptional to explain rapes committed by someone known to the victim, and these still don’t seem to be taken very seriously or seen as a very big deal by a lot of people. The two (murder, rape) examples are similar in that they’re both framed in ways to highlight our boogeymen fears, not the greater likelihood of a known offender, but murders are presented as horrifying while rapes are downplayed or not mentioned at all in most cases.

Your pastor example is horrifying, and I think does point to one of the big dimensions of a lot of issues — if we don’t talk about it, we can pretend it doesn’t exist.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:34:28 +0000

Rad, thanks for your elaboration on quizmaster's point. And of course in the on-line age, these pressures are even more acute. This is why I'm reflexively skeptical that the digital world is all about liberation for everyone, all the time--how can it be, when so much on line is just the same old myths and representations, only more of them published even faster. (I keep thinking back to Greenblatt's point about "mimesis" in Marvelous Possessions--how much easier it is to make endless representations of ideological constructs!) Susan--I forgot that you knew someone who was murdered with her children. I'm sorry--what a weird experience at the funeral. You might appreciate this column from the Denver Post about a local pastor who agreed to perform a funeral for one of the Columbine killers, and who was pushed out of his pastorate as a result:

Then followed a year of strife in a church divided about Marxhausen's outspokenness and notoriety. Though he gave only a handful of sermons on the topic, some parishioners bristled at his incessant urging that they talk about what had happened. . . . . . "If the members could have dragged the boys' bodies through town and thrown rocks at them, they would have felt better," he says. "But we live in a civilized society. . . . People want to be fixed and made whole fast. If a leader is associated with the source of their anxiety, then the leader must go."

By: Ann Bartow

Ann Bartow — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 11:20:45 +0000

This morning I note an article starting with the sentence “Investigators are trying to figure out why four relatives turned up dead in a hotel room north of Baltimore.”

A man and three women just “turned up dead.” Story here: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/04/21/us/AP-US-Hotel-Bodies.html?_r=1

By: Susan

Susan — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 05:12:17 +0000

And it’s not just the press. About 12 years ago, a former student of mine and her two children were murdered by their husband/father. At the funeral — filled with families — one of the sermons, directed to the children, was all about how your parents love you and will take care of you. HELLO? We are here why? It blew my mind.

My own take is that much commemoration in contemporary US is feel-good: we have a memorial, now we don’t have to think about policy. People are far too quick, in my opinion, to design memorials. So the memorial becomes a way of saying we’re sorry something bad happened, and not figuring out what is is we are memorializing.

WHen I was working on domestic violence, it was clear that in early modern England, men killed their wives far more often than women killed husbands, but the pamphlet literature focuses on the women. But the ways in which society responded to violence actually strengthened patriarchy. . .

By: Rad Readr

Rad Readr — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 03:51:33 +0000

Quizmaster points to an important temporal dimensions of writing breaking news. When you are working for AP on deadline, you have to go with the information on had before deadline. And in a a newspaper you have to come up with a headline that fits the space (very old school, but some of us still read news in print). But rather than see this as the “vicissitudes of news dissemination,” I would read it as the ideological effects of working within the temporal limits of news writing. In other words, reporters do not always have time to consider the ideologial effects of language. And thus their world view is more likely to seep into the headlines and/or the prose. Or to put that another way, “I need to get a version of that story in as soon as possible, even if I am overlooking male violence.”