-- Daniel Schorr
To merely invoke the name of Polly Klaas is to call her tragic story to mind, the kidnapping out of her own bedroom, and later, her merciless murder. What happened to Polly Klaas was inhuman by any standard. What her family suffered, no family should have to endure.
But while there is certainly reason to sympathize with Polly's family for their loss, this tragic episode is a decisive illustration of how stories obscure real facts. Intensely personal stories are perhaps the most effective way we have to make facts irrelevant. Every injustice happens one person at a time, even if that one person is completely atypical.
Because of the highly emotional nature of the crime, and because of the media's relentless attention, this one kidnapping and murder came to stand for Crime. While the statistics showed that the crime rate in certain, isolated categories (mostly crimes committed by young people) was higher than in previous years, on the whole crime was down--particularly the kind of violent crime that occurred in the Klaas case.
Despite the statistics, the Polly Klaas drama drove public policy. Because of its intense emotionality, it expanded beyond its own borders. It became everybody's problem, though what the specific problem was was a little vague at first. When the problem was finally defined as "murderers get out on parole," a solution could be devised ("three strikes and you're out" legislation) and enacted. All because of a story.
But at exactly the moment that "three strikes and you're out" became the party no legislator wanted to miss, a contrary story was unfolding in the press. In Singapore, 18-year-old Michael Fay was caught spray painting cars and was sentenced to receive six strokes across the bare buttocks with a wet rattan cane, later reduced in a political compromise to four.
While on its face Fay's story does not have the life-and-death emotional appeal of Polly Klaas's, the media found it equally compelling and tried to whip up a similar sense of terrible injustice. The case became an international incident. Although the American public was generally unsympathetic to Fay, the media resolutely focused on the caning, presenting it as something just short of the death penalty. Every television news organization had footage of a martial arts expert whacking the hell out of something, footage accompanied by voiceover narration about how canings slice the skin, draw blood, lead to fainting. We looked at the massacred object before us and were implored to imagine the beautiful young Fay's suffering, St. Michael of the Cane. Fay would be scarred for life, it was urged, both physically and emotionally. The caning would forever haunt him. How could the government of Singapore do such a thing? It was just a small infraction, after all. Why should the boy's punishment be so cruel?
As we know now, Fay survived the brutality and lived to profit from it. What is important here, though, is that in both the Fay story and the Klaas incident, news organizations had no allegiance to neutral facts; their loyalty in both cases was to drama.
Think about the stories the media did not tell, but could have. The Fay story could easily have been presented within the Klaas framework: If punishment is severe enough, it will deter future crime. In fact, that appears to be the framework in which most Americans saw the story. It would have been harder to present the Klaas story within the Fay framework (let's have a little sympathy for the defendant), but that story is not unheard of, as the Menendez brothers know very well.
Within the opposite story's framework, however, neither story would have sufficient capacity to stir up emotions. Presenting the Fay caning as an appropriate punishment lacks drama. Suffering has more emotional appeal than a single, quick act of well-deserved discipline. Similarly, sympathy for the defendant in the Klaas case was a little hard to muster; as a story, it was much more effective if you focused on Polly as the lead character.
Dramatic stories obscure facts and broader contexts by concentrating on a single point of view. That focus displaces other aspects of the story. In reporting the tale of Holly Ramona, who believes she recovered long-dormant memories of child abuse by her father when she was a young girl, the Los Angeles Times Magazine made this remarkable statement: "Father-daughter incest, once believed a rarity, is now said to occur in 1% to 2% of households." As the absolute number of human beings increases, words like rarity lose all meaning. Holly's story, like every story, is its own statistic; every story counts, and must be acted on. Something that happens 1 percent of the time is now more than rare, it demands our attention as a nation. And while there is no doubt of the gravity of incest, our national resources are now demanded for hundreds of thousands of things that happen 1 percent of the time, because the stories are so compelling.
Sure the cost of separating Siamese twins joined at the heart is
astronomical, but how can you deny those children (or at least one
of them) a chance at life? Can you put a value on a human being?
Damn the cost, save that child. And maybe it is true universal
health care would mean more people would live healthier lives on
the whole. But does that really mean you'll have to have a rule
that the life of an 80-year-old heart attack patient is valued less
than the life of a 14-year-old boy with a kidney problem? Look in
the face of the 80-year-old. Who makes the decision
that someone's grandmother has to die? When we view facts as
nothing more than the building blocks of drama, our focus is so
close on the characters whose story those facts affect that it's
easy to forget anything outside them.
"Life. What a beautiful choice."
--Anti-abortion TV ad
"Every life is a story waiting to be told."
--Ad campaign for the Los Angeles Times
There is no better example of the way the dramatic style now suffuses all of American society than the single example of abortion. The issue of abortion was established fully within the dramatic style sometime in the '70s, and it has flourished ever since as the most dramatic and polarized public-policy debate in modern America. While other issues such as race and sexual orientation have been similarly hyperdramatized, abortion adds a unique dimension that makes it the front runner in the drama derby--it involves the most explicit and interesting example of actual playwriting.
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