THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 17, 1995 TAG: 9510170003
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A18 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial Notebook
SOURCE: Beth Barber
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
Someday, Lord willing and O.J. aside, we will comment in the court of public opinion and adjudge in the courts of law on what people do to people, not what whites do to blacks or blacks to whites. But the route to that day seems to unfold one step forward, two steps back; and the Simpson case isn't the only recent indicator of it.
In Houma, La., last November, four black teenagers approached and severely beat a white teenager on a schoolbus. This is fact. A security camera on the bus videotaped the attack.
One of the teens, The Wall Street Journal reports, was charged with simple battery, paid a $50 fine and went home. In a hearing for two others, the stepfather of the beaten teen asked the judge how any defendant could be penalized so lightly given the brutality evident on the tape.
What tape? asked the judge.
The district attorney pleads an honest mistake. He has recharged the first teen, whose attorneys claim double jeopardy. The courts will sort that out.
The courts, unfortunately, have more sorting to do. In mid-August, the local TV station asked the sheriff for a copy of the tape, got it and prepared to broadcast it as part of a report on a pending school-oard policy of ``zero tolerance'' of student violence. The D.A.'s office seized the tape from the rattled station owner before he could show it.
The tape is not only evidence, the D.A. says; airing it, he says, would be ``destructive'' to a community that suffered a serious racial conflict at the high school last Jan-u-ary.
Leave aside, for the moment, the questions whether the D.A. is guilty of prior restraint of the press, a constitutional violation, and whether a TV station in a more sophisticated market would have thrown the D.A.'s men out. Both, I think, are true.
Let's get straight to the questions that hit homes, including homes in Hampton Roads hit a while back by the videotaped portion of the black/white bowling-alley brawl that involved high-school basketball star Allen Iverson. Or across the nation in the Rodney King case.
How reliable is a videotape? Unlike the Iverson tape, the tape from the Louisiana schoolbus, both sides say, shows very clearly who did what: Blacks attacked a white.
What it doesn't show is whether the beaten teen was, as he says, asked for $2 and was pummeled with fists and a broomstick for not handing it over; or whether he called his attackers ``nigger,'' as one of them claims. The issue here should be: Does it matter?
Is it, as the D.A. says and most of the educators in the community reportedly agree, ``reckless, insensitive and highly dangerous'' to broadcast ``this type of senseless violence, unfortunately racial in nature?
Is it, as the judge in the case has said, that ``the ones in the trenches say, `We don't need to further incite our students' ''?
Or, as the TV station owner says, do ``the citizens of this parish deserve to know what their children are subjected to - whether it's good or bad''? ``I think if I had a kid on a schoolbus,'' he adds, ``I would want to see it.''
Or, as the president of the local NAACP says, should the tape be shown on free-press grounds and the predictions of violent response in the community be dismissed as wrong? If a black student were beat by white teens, the NAACP official told The Journal, the black community would want that tape broadcast. ``You can't,'' he said, ``have it both ways.''
Actually, you can try to have it both ways. And in the process you can fuel the sentiment expressed by the beaten boy's stepfather. ``I think that white people are the minority now,'' he said, ``and they're being discriminated against. . . . By God, they didn't hesitate to show the Rodney King beating, did they?'' by CNB