A Media Literacy Approach
October 18, 2021
It’s 5am and I woke up angry about the story I read yesterday. It was pretty much everywhere but I saw it on Twitter, where the comments/replies were almost unanimous rage. A woman was raped on a train near Philadelphia at 10 at night. But the headline and gist of the article is that the other people on the train did not intervene, nor even call 911.
I’m angry, too, but for a different reason.
You could teach an entire class in media literacy from this article.
I’d have the students read the article and ask for a show of hands, who has strong emotions after reading this? Because one of the core tenets of the class is that media literacy involves close reading and dispassion. Content that evokes strong emotions is difficult to pull back and evaluate on its own merits.
I’d ask how many sources the article has. The answer is three. Yesterday it was two but the Times has added commentary from a criminologist about the Bystander Effect. The other sources are a spokesman for the train company and the superintendant of police of the town the crime took place in. Both are men.
I’d ask if the story contains any original reporting. Did the reporter go to the scene? (no) Did the reporter interview any witnesses, or any law enforcement or medics who directly were involved? (no) In fact, this entire piece is a shining example of what’s been termed “stenography journalism.”
I would ask what we know for sure and what we do not know. We know the time and duration of the attack. We know the place. We know there is surveillance footage, but no audio.
Do we know how many people were in the train car? (no) Do we know the layout of the train car? (no) Do we know where the woman was seated? (no) Do we know where the alleged witnesses were seated in relationship to her? (no) Do we know if anyone had a direct sightline to the event? (no) Do we know if there was noise or a commotion? (no) How was the lighting? Was it darkened, like late-night trains often are? Were some passengers dozing? Did some passengers have headphones or earbuds in?
At this point I’d introduce the concept of “situational awareness.” Often used in regard to pilots in air crash investigations, this refers to the pilot’s grasp of the actual situation they and the aircraft are in. For the bystanders to intervene or call 911 they would have had to a) actually witness or hear something and b) have situational awareness that what they were seeing or hearing was a sexual assault. In fact the pages and pages of comments full of rage all assume that was the case.
What in the story indicates the bystanders had situational awareness?
A close reading of the story reveals that there is *no information provided around how many people, if any, could have actually witnessed the attack.* Instead we have this from the main source:
“I’m appalled by those who did nothing to help this woman,” Timothy Bernhardt, the superintendent of the Upper Darby Township Police Department, said on Sunday. “Anybody that was on that train has to look in the mirror and ask why they didn’t intervene or why they didn’t do something.”
The act of witnessing is *implied* through his righteous anger. Later, he “declines” to say how many people were in the train car.
I would ask my students, would your reaction to this story be different if there were five people in the entire train car? How about if they were all women, would that matter? How about if one of them had children with her?
The nut graph of the story is this:
While there were not “dozens of people” in the car at the time, Mr. Bernhardt said, there were enough that, “collectively, they could have gotten together and done something.”
How many people were in the train car? There is actually information in Mr. Bernhardt’s vagueness. There are definitely fewer than 24 people in the car; we do not know how many people it seats nor the orientation of the seats, the height of the seats, or the position of any of the people. But we also get a sense that there were *far fewer* than the “not dozens” of people.
The comment that “collectively” they could have interveneed does not convey overwhelming force, inevitible success, or a swarm of people composed of a subset of all of the people on the train. Instead it sounds like everyone in the entire car would have needed to coordinate an intevention. A coordinated intervention requires: a) situational awareness and b) at least eye contact between two or more people with awareness.
What is the most incendiary detail in the piece? What really puts it over the top?
He added that investigators had received reports of some passengers recording the attack on their phones
In the comments on social media about this article people are appalled. People recorded a rape!! Some comments opine about the degradation of empathy, the callousness of the TikTok generation, etc.
Here’s the end of the sentence: but that the police had not confirmed those reports.
The most disturbing aspect of the story is not confirmed. But the main source included it and the reporter (and all other outlets running this story) chose to include it as well.
They need to include it because there are an entire two paragraphs later in the piece about whether the presumed indifferent, callous, voyeuristic passengers can be prosecuted.
In my fantasy media literacy course I would pair this article with another story from the summer before last, at the height of the George Floyd protests.
The “3 Cops Poisoned at Shake Shack” story. It ran nationally. It was sourced only by the NYPD and their union, which held a press conference in front of a hospital. It occasioned vast outpourings of rage at Black Lives Matter, at Shake Shack’s support for the same, at “antifa” at “thugs” — it was incendiary. And it was completely false. No cops were sickened (although their sergeant sent them to the hospital when one complained her shake tasted funny). No substance was in the shakes. And perhaps most salient of all, the shakes were ordered via an app, and packaged and ready by the time the cops came to pick them up, so *there could have been no intent to harm police.*
I would ask my class what they notice about the rape story headline. The answer is it includes “Police Say,” putting the reader on notice that this is explicitly the police perspective. I would ask them what might be another possible headline?
How about “Police Superintendant Enraged At Do-Nothing Civilians.”? How about “Police Superintendant Furious that Late-Night Commuters Fail To Display Flight 93-Levels of Coordinated Courage”?
Because, ultimately, this is a story about Superintendant Bernhardt’s feelings. All of the factual elements of what happened are conveyed in his words and through the lens of his anger. And Bernhardt was not an investigating officer. He has spoken to none of the witnesses. His entire diatribe is based on silent security footage of the rape.
We have no doubt that Bernhardt feels righteous fury. But what could be the point of framing a press conference about a rape in your jurisdiction entirely around the failure of alleged witnesses to intervene?
Are we angry at the security situation on the train? (No, we are angry at the passengers). Are reporters asking about the frequency of crime on the train or how often personnel patrol the aisles? (No) Reporters are asking whether the passengers might face prosecution. Reporters are calling the district atttorney about what charges might be applicable.
And the passengers? To whatever degree of awareness they did or didn’t have, to whatever degree of horror or trauma they felt upon learning what had happened, their appropriate empathy and concern in retrospect for their own safety has been preempted by the narrative of their moral failings.
In other words, an entirely different story might have focused on the danger late-night passengers in fairly empty train cars face, and the righteous anger of the passengers upon learning they had been in proximity with a violent criminal with no train security in sight. Instead, we are completely on the side of the police. We are furious that unarmed civilians of unspecified gender, age, and health did not stage a coordinated, tactical intervention — something armed police, by the way, often also fail at.
Update 4 days later, October 22 2021
I was 100% fucking correct
In fact, Superintendant Bernhardt, whose rage drove the entire news story, picked up by the Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, NBC, Fox, AP…
“Both SEPTA and Upper Darby Police Department Superintendent Timothy Bernhardt had said people watched the attack and took cellphone video without calling 911. “It’s disturbing that there were definitely people on the El and no one did anything to intervene or help this woman,” Bernhard said previously.
However, Bernhardt stood alongside Stollsteimer on Thursday, with Stollsteimer placing the blame for misinformation on SEPTA officials, not the police superintendent.”
