>Nicely said, Margaret. There is a definite pattern here - it is always
>human error/operator's fault - never a systemic failure.
Andrew Ross makes a nice point in that Salon piece I mentioned earlier:
<quote> One reason for the disconnect, argues Andrew Ross, who chairs the American studies department at NYU, is how the media handles race. Ross notes that when white suburban kids go wrong, there's enormous pressure to find a psychological cause rather than a social explanation.
"White suburban kids are assumed to have an individual psychic development that can be sidetracked into dysfunctional forms of expression, if there is some sufficiently powerful external stimulus -- a video game, a lurid Web site -- that can knock them off course." But when it comes to inner-city black kids, "the explanations are assumed to be socially determined from the get-go." By the media's lights, "Society explains their behavior in a way that strips them of their individuality and retains only their class and race attributes" -- which is why video games are never trotted out to explain homicide in inner-city schools.
In the end, says Ross, the pattern is distinctly American: "Since the early days of the republic, it has also been an elementary rule of public life for grandstanding experts and gatekeepers to hold popular culture responsible." </quote>
Doug