No fear; No TV

Oregonian columnist Renee Mitchell today bemoaned the reported decline of civility in the city. People no longer greet each other, or wave or learn each other’s names, she opined.

“We’re afraid to venture out at night because we don’t know who’s out there, lurking in the darkness. Or what they’re capable of,” she wrote.

She cited statistics showing that more and more people are feeling unsafe beyond the confines of their houses. The nights are particularly unnerving.

Her solution was to encourage neighbors to attend National Night Out events on August 5. Dozens of the neighborhood get-togethers are planned around the city.

That’s well and good, but what about the rest of the year? And what about that lingering feeling that to be alone on our streets at night is taking your life into your hands.

I wrote Renee to suggest that people should consider simply shutting off their TVs — in particular the lurid crime reporting foisted on a gullible, but sensation-seeking public. FOX News on KPTV, and its ratings-hungry mimics, thrive on broadcasting mayhem. It’s cheap, reality-twisting reporting.

Much of the rest of TV does the same, making violence and its lurid appeal its stock-in trade. I suggested to Renee that her own newspaper, as it struggles to maintain readership, seems to be printing more crime news and giving it more prominence.

Several years ago media researcher George Gerbner discovered that heavy viewers of TV had an inflated sense of how much crime is in their communities. They had come to accept the crime-infested media portrayals over the reality of the world outside their doors. In short, TV was frightening them into home-bound isolation. He called the phenomenon “The Mean World Syndrome.”

So if you want to feel safer and better about your neighborhood, by all means go to the National Night Out in your neighborhood. But if you want to feel better permanently about the world around you, TURN OF THE TV NEWS. Better yet, call the stations to complain.

P.S. On a related note, attendance at our inter-generational Thursday Game Board Nights at the bottom of our hill is picking up. And, yes, we are learning each other’s names and getting to know, trust, and like each other.

Murder on my mind

Last Thursday night at about 11:45, a man was shot in the Hillsdale Shopping Center parking lot “just west of the Wild Oats grocery store…” according to a sketchy story in Saturday’s Oregonian. He died soon after.

I’m weighing the details, trying to decide whether I should find out more about the murder.

Here is more from The Oregonian story:

The victim was listed as a Michael Christopher Mason, 25, “who was on probation for failure to register as a sex offender stemming from a 1995 juvenile sodomy conviction in which the victim was a younger relative.”

Mason’s most recent address was “along NE 162nd Avenue.” He also faced “possession of meth charges from last July.”

That was what we learned on Saturday.

I’ve been watching the newspaper for the past two days for a follow story but so far nothing. I put out a call today to our local crime prevention officer, Michael Boyer, as he is a good source who first alerted me to the story on Friday.

FOX news loves stories like this and could be a place to watch, but frankly, I can’t bring myself to monitor FOX for its breathless tabloid reporting.

Still, because I put out a little on-line newsletter, called the Hillsdale News, the murder story is testing my mission for the cyber-publication.

How much does its 200 readers need to know about the murder of a pedophile/meth head who apparently lived 10 miles from here?

I could apply some textbook news “values “ to the story as it stands:

Is it timely? Yes but the most significant event has been reported.
Is it nearby? Yes because it happened here; no because the victim doesn’t seem to be from here.
Does it involve someone prominent? Apparently not.
Does it have an impact on readers? Seemingly not.
Is it unusual? Yes, murders are rare here.

The story gets a middling score, if you accept these traditional news values as being valid. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

Unless there is more to this — I know it may sound crass —this is a story for curiosity seekers and Rupert Murdoch.

Still, a few questions come to mind, the answers to which might elevate the story to significance. What was Mason doing here? Passing through? Did he present a danger to the neighborhood? Who killed him? Someone from around here? And why? Could his murder have resulted from a meth deal gone bad?

There is another curious angle. According to the Oregonian story, after Mason was shot, someone dropped him and a woman companion off at the Hopewell House Hospice in Hillsdale. Apparently the driver thought the hospice was some kind of medical facility. (“Hospice?…Hospital?…Whatever!”)

The story gave the driver’s name as “Jason,” but “Jason” didn’t stick around to see what would happen to the mortally wounded Mason and the woman, whose name, for some reason, wasn’t given in the story. As of Saturday, the police were trying to find “Jason,” who was reportedly driving a white Ford Focus at the time of the murder.

So here are more questions: Have the police found “Jason”? Where does HE live? Is he a suspect? Are there any suspects? And what about the woman? Who is she? What does she know? Was she a witness? What was her relationship to Mason, or, for that matter, to “Jason.”

Finally there’s the question that only I can answer: In light of the Hillsdale News’ mission, which is to help inform the community about events and developments important to its progress, does Mason’s murder matter?