Nothing quite lures the shark in a reporter like a crime story, and one this week, though it lacked the scent of blood, offered plenty to feast on.
On Tuesday night, a few minutes before 11 p.m., a 15-year-old boy and a Democratic state lawmaker exchanged gunfire on a residential block in Midtown Harrisburg. According to a statement by the lawmaker, Rep. Marty Flynn of Scranton, he was walking with another representative to an apartment they rent on 2nd Street when the boy approached, pointing a gun at them and asking for their wallets.
Flynn drew a handgun of his own and fired two shots; the juvenile fired one. Then, the statement says, they “ran in different directions.” No one was injured.
Aside from the usual intrigue accompanying a crime, what made the incident so appetizing to the press? First, there was the fact that six people were involved in the incident, four of them minors. Along with the second lawmaker, Rep. Ryan Bizzarro, D-Erie, there were allegedly three additional perpetrators, one of them 15 years old like the shooter, the others 17.
Then there was the interest in the lawmakers themselves—first-termers whose names sound like a Marvel superhero and his alter-ego. Flynn, a former Lackawanna County prison guard, also has a past that includes training in mixed martial arts and boxing.
Capitolwire.com, a subscription news service covering the statehouse, broke the story in the middle of the night, after a reporter picked up a tip while monitoring a late-running Senate session at the statehouse. By Wednesday morning, every newspaper in the Commonwealth was interested, and even some of the seasoned reporters couldn’t help but get caught up in the sensationalism.
“Two lawmakers involved in shoot-out with robbers near Capitol,” ran the headline on Philly.com, suggesting that whatever went down was a good deal heavier than three misfires and a mutual decision to flee the scene.
But the truly sensational headline came in the local paper of record, the Patriot-News, whose front page in the Thursday morning print-edition proclaimed Harrisburg “Dangerous for anybody.” Below the fold—lest the absence of subject and verb confuse readers—a second headline clarifies exactly what is dangerous, and for whom: “Capitol staffers are urged to avoid city streets.”
The lower headline was derived from a quote by Tony Aliano, chief of staff to the Republican Speaker of the House, who, we are told, counseled “representatives seeking advice” in the wake of Tuesday’s incident to “avoid the streets of Harrisburg until they get the situation under control.” What “situation” is being referred to here, I’m not sure; given the lawmakers involved in the shooting were Democrats, I think the “situation” might be the Republicans’ horror that the latest poster-child for the right to carry is a straight-laced former boxer of the opposing party.
But the Aliano quote didn’t come from Aliano. It entered the pages of the Patriot secondhand, by way of the spokesman for the House Republicans, Steve Miskin. Which leads to a question: Did anyone at the Patriot pause to consider whether a secondhand quote from someone barely connected to the incident deserved to dictate the tone of an entire article?
Moreover, on what authority are Miskin and Aliano—not to mention Flynn, whose own quote, “I don’t feel safe walking the streets in Harrisburg,” also graces the story—making pronouncements about crime in the city? To put this another way, would a quote from the city’s police chief belong in a story on the prospects of a Senate bill?
I was at the press conference Wednesday afternoon in city hall at which the mayor and Chief Thomas Carter discussed Tuesday’s shooting. Because I was there, I heard other quotes and facts about the incident which might have earned a more prominent place in the next day’s reporting. For starters, there were the comments from Mayor Papenfuse, who kicked things off by praising what he saw as a case of “excellent police work.” As it turned out, the police department had placed extra officers in the area after a similar incident Monday night, and they apprehended three of the four alleged criminals within five minutes of receiving the 911 call.
Twice in the day after Tuesday’s exchange of fire, I passed by the block where the shooting occurred. The first time was after Wednesday’s conference, when my editor and I took a detour up the street by car. There we encountered a middle-aged couple who live in one of the many well-kept buildings on the block. They had heard the shots, they said, and like many of their neighbors had immediately called the police. They told us one of the shell casings had been recovered from the sidewalk in front of their home. They said they were always impressed by the Harrisburg police, whom they thought deserved more credit. They did not seem the least bit rattled.
The second time was later that night, around 11 p.m., the same time as the shooting the night before. This time, I was in the neighborhood because I live there, a few doors down from the apartment rented by Bizzarro and Flynn. At the end of the block where the shooting occurred is the Midtown Tavern, my neighborhood bar. A small crowd was there, most of them for the Giants-Cardinals game. The shooting, if it troubled them at all, seemed to be outweighed by the $2 drafts on special and the 40-cent wings.
It bears mentioning that the Patriot’s coverage was not totally one-sided. On Thursday afternoon, the online paper ran several follow-up stories, including one with the headline “Crimes targeting random victims still relatively rare in Harrisburg.” Reading between the lines, however, you see it’s a story in part created by the earlier coverage; it includes a comment from the mayor’s spokeswoman, who is quoted as being unhappy with “sensational and misleading” headlines.
In any case, the calculus that led the paper to step out first with headlines like the one in print is all-too-evident on the Web page: the “relatively rare” hook, as of this writing, had drawn six comments and two shares on Twitter, up against the 210 comments and 309 Facebook shares drawn by its “I don’t feel safe” counterpart.
Even the follow-ups, though, point back to the original problem. That the paper should spend further energy on the story just to balance out prior coverage shows what’s really at issue. It’s not simply the harm that front pages like this morning’s do by distorting what it’s really like to live in the city. It’s the good they fail to do, by diverting resources—and good reporters—towards sensation and drama and away from what matters.
Along this line, let me suggest an area of inquiry, inspired by this week’s events, that could use a few more notebooks and pairs of eyes: three of the four juveniles charged in the attempted robbery were students in the Harrisburg school district, where, over the past two years, 247 teachers and 28 administrators have either resigned, retired or been furloughed.
Might this exodus of experience, and its effect on school and student morale, have something to do with the recent state intervention in the district, under which a Republican-appointed official cut benefits and salaries? It almost sounds like a question for a spokesman at the Capitol.
An earlier version of this article referred speculatively to a “news peg” on which a Patriot-News article, “Crimes targeting random victims still relatively rare in Harrisburg,” was based. The phrase “a story the earlier coverage created” has been changed to “a story in part created by the earlier coverage”; the reference to the story’s news peg has been removed.
