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Study: Threat of School Violence Exaggerated
Media Hype Leads to ‘Misguided’ Campus Policies
April 12, 2000

By Hans H. Chen

WASHINGTON (APBnews.com) — Live from Littleton, Colo., nearly a year
ago, America saw Columbine High students running past the body of a
fallen classmate as they fled from their armed peers.

Eleven months earlier, Americans had viewed images of grief-stricken
students in Springfield, Ore., the survivors of another school shooting.

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Every few months, such images were beamed out live from around the
country: Columbine; Springfield; Paducah, Ky; and Jonesboro, Ark.

The media depictions of these school shootings, though emotionally
potent, have led to irrational fears and unreasonable safety measures in
schools across the country, a Washington criminal justice think tank
reported today.

Deaths had fallen 40 percent

“School House Hype: Two Years Later,” published by the Justice Policy
Institute, follows the institute’s similar report two years earlier. The
new report matched actual crime statistics with people’s fear of school
shootings, as measured by polls.

The comparisons revealed a significant disparity between the two sets of
data.

According to the report, 49 percent of Americans polled by USA Today
immediately after the Columbine shooting said they feared school
shootings more at that point than they had the year before. But
school-associated violent deaths actually fell 40 percent in the
1998-1999 school year compared with the year before.

The odds of a child dying at school remain one in 2 million, according
to the National School Safety Center. But 71 percent of people answering
a 1998 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll said they thought it likely
that a school shooting could take place in their community.

And even though only 4 percent of juvenile homicides occur in rural
areas, a May 1999 Gallup poll found that 54 percent of rural parents
feared school violence would harm their children, compared with the 46
percent of urban parents and the 44 percent of suburban parents who said
the same.

Coverage influences opinion

Jason Ziedenberg, a co-author of the Justice Policy Institute report,
blames the media’s ubiquitous, unceasing broadcasts of school shootings
for this distorted perception of school violence.

“When something like a school shooting happens, which is a riveting
story, everybody covers it, and everybody covers it in volume,”
Ziedenberg said. “The problem was … the volume of the coverage has
really influenced people’s opinion.”

Twenty-four-hour national news operations such as CNN and MSNBC have
especially misled many, Ziedenberg said.

“Before, when something serious happened of a crime nature, it was
community-oriented,” Ziedenberg said. “Now the kind of community idea of
where crime occurs is so much more nationwide.”

‘Mean World Syndrome’

Ziedenberg’s position is bolstered by academic research into the media’s
effect on people’s fears. Ten years ago, George Gerbner, the former dean
of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of
Pennsylvania, coined the term “Mean World Syndrome” to describe the
exaggerated fears people have developed from watching murder and mayhem
on the news.

The more television people watch, the more fearful they become.

“For all practical purposes, they live in a meaner world than their
neighbor, who lives next door but [may watch] less television,” Gerbner
told APBnews.com.

The news worsens fears even if the news story takes place far away.

“Nothing is far away if it happens in the United States,” said Gerbner,
now a professor at Temple University. “If it is in a familiar setting,
and if it reverberates sufficiently, it has an effect in every
locality.”

Extreme, misguided steps?

These exaggerated fears have led some administrators to take extreme,
misguided steps, Ziedenberg said, such as zero-tolerance and mandatory
expulsion policies.

The report cited statistics from the federal Department of Education’s
Office for Civil Rights that showed an increase in suspensions from 1.7
million in 1974 to 3.1 million by 1997.

Few children reform themselves after getting kicked out of school, the
report claims. Citing statistics from the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, the report says that youths out of school are more
likely to get involved in physical fights and to carry weapons.

The report also says that out-of-school teens are more likely to smoke
and use alcohol, marijuana and cocaine, as well as to engage in sexual
intercourse, have poor eating habits and not wear seat belts.

Minority students affected most

According to the Justice Policy Institute, these suspensions and
expulsions have had a disproportionate impact on minority students.

In Phoenix, school records cited by the institute showed that black
students were suspended and expelled at 22 times the rates of whites.
Schools in Austin, Texas; Denver and San Francisco all suspend and expel
black students at three times the rate of white students.

“A lot of these zero-tolerance polices are being implemented in the name
of a handful of school shootings that, for the most part, were
perpetrated by white children in ‘suburbs’ in the rural U.S.,”
Ziedenberg said. “So, ironically, the solution to that seems to be
having its greatest impact on minority kids.”

Group justifies harsh measures

But the National School Boards Association defended the necessity of
passing harsh rules.

“I think there are some things for which schools should say, ‘We have no
tolerance for this,’” said Julie Underwood, the general counsel of the
American School Boards Association. “There is no place for handguns in
our schools — period.”

But today’s report says schools are being driven to adopt these measures
by a distorted fear of lawsuits.

Immunity for educators

In fact, while school shootings have led to several high-profile
lawsuits, such as the $2.5 million wrongful-death suit against the
parents of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, both federal and state judges
have generally upheld immunity for school officials who were doing their
job normally, said Kim Brooks, a co-author of the Justice Policy
Institute report.

In Kentucky, for example, the state Supreme Court dismissed charges
against 30 of the 45 plaintiffs sued by parents of three girls killed in
the West Paducah school shooting.

But one lawyer who advises schools said educators should worry more
about student safety than student rights.

“I guess I’d rather defend the free-speech case than the wrongful-death
case,” said Dean Pickett, a lawyer in Flagstaff, Ariz., who represents
several Arizona school districts.

Institute calls for perspective

But the Justice Policy Institute remains convinced that greater
perspective on the real risks of school violence could lead to more
reasonable safety measures. The group is calling for improved
gun-control measures, more media context, greater student involvement in
conflict-resolution programs and less reliance upon intimidating
measures such as metal detectors and expulsion policies.

“There are real problems with youth violence in this country that we
need to solve, and we can’t solve them if we’re putting up metal
detectors and hiring school police in schools that have virtually no
crime problem,” Ziedenberg said.

Hans H. Chen is an APBnews.com staff writer ([email protected]).