Audio Did media coverage sensationalize the Rocori shootings? (story audio) Photos Rocori High School Richard Lawrence More from MPR MPR coverage of the Rocori shootings Rocori students make it through tough year (05/28/2004) Resources Statistics from the National School Safety Center Professor Richard Lawrence's web site The Minnesota Department of Education's web site Your Voice News Forum: Did the media handle the coverage well?

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Did media coverage sensationalize the Rocori shootings?
by Annie Baxter, Minnesota Public Radio
September 24, 2004

The one year anniversary of the Rocori High School shootings will be marked privately at the school. (MPR Photo/Annie Baxter)

School officials at Rocori High School in Cold Spring have asked the media to stay away from the school today. It was one year ago that a student opened fire on classmates Aaron Rollins and Seth Bartell. Both boys died and 16-year-old Jason McLaughlin is charged with the shootings. His case is awaiting trial. The school's wish to commemorate the day privately comes after a year of frequent media presence in Cold Spring. It's not clear how useful that coverage was for the broader public.

St.Cloud, Minn. — Just fifteen minutes after the school at Rocori High school, the media frenzy began. Calls from organizations like CNN clogged the school's phone lines. Reporters from media outlets around the state descended on the town of Cold Spring.

At first, the town's residents warily answered questions. But that soon changed. After a few days, the school officially closed its doors to the media's gaze.

In the months after the shooting, school officials began to speak publicly about their dealings with the media.

Doug Standke was the Rocori principal at the time. At a forum on journalism and tragedy at St. Cloud State University, he spoke of how one media outlet exploited the shootings to promote its own coverage.

	Richard Lawrence

"A TV station used a lot of spot clips that really went quite fast on the screen, but it was more or less an ad for their station," Standke explained. "Of those 11 shots that went real fast, seven were from Rocori. There was almost a feeling of glamorization there. That was a hard piece for the community."

But it's not just the Cold Spring community that was affected by the press's obsession with the shooting. Anyone tuned in to that media coverage could come away with a false sense of panic. That's the view of St. Cloud State criminal justice professor Richard Lawrence. He deals with issues of media coverage in his book "School Violence and Juvenile Justice."

"What we have to be cautious about, is to take a few isolated incidents and create a climate of fear throughout the nation and begin to believe that serious violence -- violence causing injury -- is happening all the time every day, and can happen in your own school," he asserts.

Lawrence points to coverage of the Columbine shootings in 1999 to show how the media can spread panic. Two teenage boys killed 15 people at Columbine High school in Littleton, Colorado. Lawrence says the three major television networks alone ran over 300 reports on the story.

For Lawrence, the results of a Gallup poll taken a year after the shootings hint at the effect of those reports. The poll asked how likely people think it is that violence will happen in their own schools.

"And I believe that two-thirds of the people believed that it could happen in their own school," he notes.

What we have to be cautious about is to take a few isolated incidents and create a climate of fear throughout the nation and begin to believe that serious violence-- violence causing injury--is happening all the time every day, and can happen in your own school - Richard Lawrence

According to Lawrence's research, it's extremely unlikely that a school will experience violence.

Ronald Stephens of the National School Safety Center agrees. His center's statistics indicate that there were 55 school-associated deaths at the end of the school year in 1994. This past school year, there were fewer than half as many school related deaths, only 23.

Stephens says in addition to being rare, school violence is also random.

"Violence is no respecter of persons or geography. And one of the things that school administrators constantly say is they never thought it would happen here," Stephens explains. "It's something that's always supposed to happen somewhere else. And yet anytime an incident happens in an unsuspecting place, it's a reminder of the vulnerability we have."

Stephens says that vulnerability can be offset by anti-bullying programs and security cameras. But even schools with some of those measures in place, including Columbine, have been subject to violence.

Even still, Richard Lawrence insists schools are relatively safe havens.

"Students are still safer at school than they are on many city streets and than they are in their own homes," he says.

Lawrence admits this fact is probably no consolation to the people in Cold Spring. But he thinks it's a point the media needs to make.

Today, it's a point that's perhaps best made from a distance, respecting the school officials' wish for privacy.

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