Tiger Beatdown

The Federal Communications Commission just released a substantial report on the state of media communications in the United States. You can take a gander at the full report in .pdf, if you feel so inclined. There’s a lot to tease apart in this extremely lengthy document, but The Consumerist highlighted an issue of particular news to me; the state of local news coverage in the new media age.

Good local news coverage is absolutely critical for citizens. Without media reportage on topics of local interest, citizens may not be aware of things they critically need to know about. Not everyone has the time to go digging for dirt, or has the research skills to know where to start. People rely on radio, television, and newspapers for information about local events, and the FCC points out that people television in particular plays a critical role in the media consumption habits of many people in the US, with 78% of survey respondents reporting that they get their news from the television.

In the United States, we live in an era when access to global news is a fingertip away, although the quality of that reporting is variable, and the media tends to be highly selective about what it covers; this week, for example, the US media is obsessed with some congressman’s dick, but there was actually a major election in Peru that could have important policy implications for the United States, in addition to being of inherent interest. While the media salivates over Sarah Palin, the Committee to Protect Journalists releases a critical report on rape and sexual assault in the journalism profession worldwide. On the national and international level, all of these topics are important.

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Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a ‘commentary’ on young adult fiction by Meghan Cox Gurdon, who evidently ‘regularly writes about children’s books for the Journal.‘ With a qualification like that, you can expect some quality journalism; a thoughtful discussion, perhaps, of the current state of YA, maybe. Some coverage of attempts at book bannings, perhaps, like the assault on Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak that occurred last year. Possibly even some coverage of the rise of crossover fiction, books that appeal to both youths and adults. There are lots of things to talk about, given that YA is exploding, as a genre.

But no. This is the Wall Street Journal. And that means it’s time to concerntroll for pageviews:

Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail…a careless young reader—or one who seeks out depravity—will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds…Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue.

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Big news for California last week, with a decision in Brown v. Plata, an important case for prisoner rights. This case is primarily being reported in the media as a mandate for prisoner release, which to some extent, it is; it affirms a decision to mandate a reduction in California’s prisoner population to address prison overcrowding. To illustrate how severe the overcrowding is, the state must reduce the prisoner population to a mere 137.5% of capacity in the next two years. The media wants you to know that this case means that California is about to be flooded with a horde of violent criminals, and that’s the main takeaway it wants you to have. Nothing else to see here, move along!

The truth, as it often is, is much more complicated. This is not just a case about prison overcrowding, a historic and very serious problem in California. It is also a case about access to basic health care services in California prisons. This is a saga that has been battled out in the courts for over 20 years; back in 1990, the court determined that mentally ill prisoners were not receiving adequate health care services and ordered the state to do better. A series of legal machinations and arguments led to the decision to put the prison health care system into receivership, an indicator that the state was not able to meet the health care needs of its prisoners. Last year, a judge determined that even with the receivership, California was still failing its prisoners. The current litigation directly speaks to the ongoing battle over access to health care in prisons not just in California, but across the United States, where a prison term can be a death sentence.

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