Violent 'Times'

Brown hair rumpled as though he'd just gotten out of bed, the handcuffed 15-year-old high school freshman walked across three front-page columns of the March 6 New York Times. His mammoth white jumpsuit dragged the ground. The name of the red-cheeked perp, who's charged as an adult for killing two students and wounding 13 others in Santee, California, appeared prominently under the photo. The story, by Todd S. Purdum, called the attack "the nation's deadliest school shooting since the April 1999 bloodbath at Columbine High."

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Unacceptable, says Youth Force, a group of South Bronx teens advocating responsible coverage of kids. Member Shaquesha Alequin, 19, who coauthored a report released in February called "In Between the Lines: How The New York Times Frames Youth," sent Purdum a critique of his Santee articles, taking him to task for perpetuating myths about youth and failing to put the incident in proper context. Alequin says that in its first two days of covering Santee, the Times scored points by quoting several teens but lost ground by using the inflammatory photo rather than a yearbook shot and by running images of weeping and injured students. Nor did the Times mention the overall decline in youth violence. "And 'bloodbath,' " she says. "Hmmm. That's just bad reporting."

When Purdum twice called the Santee shooting the worst since Columbine, he left out two others listed by the National School Safety Center: the June 1999 shooting, possibly by an adult, of two Mexican American students on their way to school in California and the March 2000 killing of two African American teens by another African American teen at a Georgia high school dance.

Purdum tells the Voice that he was "touched" by Alequin's "obvious sincerity," but his deadline did not allow time for digging up statistics. "I was surprised with her apparent lack of familiarity with age-old journalistic conventions, and the obvious constraints of daily journalism," he says. "If I had known youth violence was declining, I'd have been happy to put that in."

	"We were waiting for a handshake," she says. "We didn't get one." She says the staffers did not introduce themselves or let the teens make their presentation. "They didn't even know we had an agenda. Every time we tried to get a word in, they would cut us right off."

The Times should have known, Alequin says, because Youth Force gave the paper its report in December. Sponsored by several media-watchdog groups, she and eight other Youth Force teens, all students of color from the Arturo Schomburg Satellite Academy in the Bronx, analyzed Times coverage of young people as either victims or perpetrators, from January to March 2000. In the 93 relevant articles -- including 35 national and 51 Metro pieces -- the Times wrote about 132 perps and 117 victims. The group found the stories rarely discussed societal causes and mentioned only incarceration as a solution.

The teens also reported that the Times routinely portrayed youth of color more negatively. In 11 articles where race was identifiable, the Times never quoted black or Latino youth perpetrators directly, while white kids spoke in their own defense five times. White perps, according to the Youth Force analysis, were all pictured in yearbook photos or in a suit and tie, and all outside the courtroom. Two of three minority youths were shown in courtrooms, including a March 9, 2000, full-body photo of a Latino youth with shackles on his hands and feet. The March 6 photo of the accused Santee shooter gives Alequin no solace. "The fact that they used a picture of a white youth in handcuffs doesn't justify it," she says. "It's still a bad picture."

Youth Force asked for a meeting with the Times in December before posting its document at www.interrupt.org. Alequin describes the Times editorialists and reporters, mostly from the Metro desk, as condescending. "We were waiting for a handshake," she says. "We didn't get one." She says the staffers did not introduce themselves or let the teens make their presentation. "They didn't even know we had an agenda. Every time we tried to get a word in, they would cut us right off. We're not journalists; it takes a while to learn how to continue talking when they're interrupting you."