The first time I read the story, I’ll admit, I chuckled. The word sketch of a “stocky” 9-year-old kid struggling with a football tackling dummy on a 92-degree day was funny, even charming. The Julius Peppers wannabe starts out boastful — “I was meant for tackling” — but by the end of the day he has retreated to the sidelines, nursing a headache in a lawn chair under the trees. It was “America’s Best Home Videos,” nicely drawn in words by a talented N&O writer, a scene familiar to many sandlot parents.
But this Aug. 4 story about a Raleigh football camp for kids was not pleasing to the parents of this gridiron gladiator. “As a mother, I was ‘hot’ about the tone and underlying messages in the article about my son,” his mother wrote in a letter to The N&O. (I won’t use the name of the 9-year-old, nor his parent, so as not to amplify any damage already done.)
The mother’s objection, and that of others I’ve heard from, was the portrayal of the youngster as a wimp, subtly conveyed by certain words and phrases in the article. The boy was described as “stocky” and “a bit slow on the uptake.” At the beginning of the camp, he “boasts” of his tackling prowess; by the end it’s: “I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m tired.”
I’m confident that the writer and the newspaper didn’t intend to make fun of this youngster. The article was one of The N&O’s series of “Summer Snapshots,” light vignettes with photos that depict slices of summer life in the Triangle. The football camp was a perfect snapshot opportunity, but the story misfired — for some readers, at least.
“Who would do that to anyone, 9 or 90?” asked reader Christina Baldowski of Wake Forest. “It would seem that you need to develop some tact.”
Van Denton, The N&O’s metro editor, says he doubts that everyone read the story the same way. But “I’m sure that I would have read it in a different way if I had been the parent. I’m still not sure I would have taken offense at it,” said Denton, who is the parent of children ages 7 and 12.
This sad little tale gives us a chance to examine the intersection between children and newspapers. Unhappy experiences are infrequent, but they occur. Last winter, during the height of the Wakefield school controversy, I was upbraided by parents objecting to a picture of their young daughters walking home from school accompanying a story that, they felt, portrayed Wakefield families as elitist. The picture ran without the parents’ knowledge or permission.
That’s legal, you might want to know. In a public setting, a child can be photographed or interviewed without the parents’ permission under most conditions.
“When we’re in a public place, we don’t have a policy that you can’t include a kid without a parent’s permission,” Denton said. “We use our judgment,” considering factors such as the age and maturity level of the child.
That’s fine with me, by the way. The N&O hires people based in part on how good their judgment is. And it would be impossible to write a policy for every circumstance involving children. How old are you to be considered a child? What about children who commit crimes?
Schools are a separate matter. Most have policies specific to the school regarding media access to students, and The N&O adheres to those policies. Photographers generally try to let parents know if they have shot a child’s picture, say, in a mall or on the street.
There are news occasions, say a natural disaster, where a child is involved and will need to be part of the story, permission or not, for the news to be fully and completely reported.
In the case of the football camp, The N&O was invited by the camp organizer to cover the event, and the reporter tried to call the mother to clarify information but was unable to reach her before writing the story. They did have a discussion afterward, when the mother called to complain, and the reporter sent additional photos of her son as a good-will gesture.
My approach to children and newspapers is that kids represent an opportunity to put good news in the paper and offset some of the other less-than-uplifting newspaper fare. A good example is coverage of high school and participatory sports, which is shepherded at The N&O by preps editor Tim Stevens.
“We go out of our way to accentuate the positive,” Stevens said. “We would identify the person who recovered the fumble rather than the person who fumbled, the player that intercepted a pass rather than the player who threw the pass, and the guy who scored the touchdown, instead of the guy who missed the tackle.
“We don’t want to put a child in a position where they could be held up for ridicule or made fun of, when all they really want to do is participate.”
That strikes me as a pretty good standard to go by. As does that suggested by the mother who wrote us: “In the future, it is my hope that the editors at The News & Observer will read each article as if it were written about a member of their family as part of the regular editing process.”
That’s part of the problem, though. Newspapers have a blind spot in dealing with children because much of the news staff is young, unmarried, without children. At The N&O, about a third of the 259 news folk have children. Neither the reporter nor the editor of the football camp story is a parent.
I was talking to another editor here this week, a mother of an athletics-challenged child, who said she had burst into tears when she read the story. Different personal perspectives, different reactions. As she said, it points out the value of having a diverse staff — which The N&O could use more of. That’s another column.
