Who owns the Columbine tragedy?

As reporters swarm on the first day of school, students will try to "take back" their high school and put the massacre behind them.

By Dave Cullen

Aug 16, 1999 | A battle for "ownership" of the Columbine High School tragedy will commence Monday morning as reporters descend on the scarred high school for the back-to-school media bonanza. Ironically, the main story will likely be a giant choreographed ritual, where students symbolically "Take Back the School" from the media, who they believe have turned their home into a national symbol of mass murder and youth violence.

Even as they gleefully report that story, of course, hundreds of reporters will work feverishly to disprove it, undermining its veracity by their very existence here.

Monday's event will wrap up a week of bitter wrangling between the media and Columbine officials over how to cover the back-to-school event, and over the general issue of how the media dealt with the killings. Last Monday about 40 media representatives sat down with half a dozen school district officials, flanked by victims' advocates and social scientists, in a Holiday Inn just west of Denver, for an event billed as "Media Guidelines Summit." Both national and local media were well-represented, including the network affiliates, local papers, the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, CNN and the Associated Press.

The invitation and agenda were filled with conciliatory phrases like "balance the interests," "exchange ideas" and "discussion." But the meeting quickly degenerated into ultimatums and ended with major national print media reps huddling in the back plotting legal action.

Columbine officials tried to explain why the media coverage to date was harmful to students. University of Colorado Professor Donald Bechtold told reporters that students are still in the early stages of bereavement and post-traumatic response, and the constant repetition of the same images -- SWAT teams, bloody students, crying parents -- is damaging. Students' recovery depends on changing destructive images, he said. Victims' advocate Robin Finegan, who worked with survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing, agreed. "With mass tragedies, there comes a point where victims need to have ownership of their tragedy," she said.

So far, the media has owned the Columbine tragedy. Most resentment has focused on the national media, which swarmed in the days and weeks after the killings, and still occasionally descends for the odd story. The local media has been more respectful, but it's continued to work the story relentlessly. Three months after the tragedy, the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News were still running several stories a day. In July alone, the two papers ran a combined 120 Columbine stories, for an average of nearly four a day. By late last week, the impending back-to-school peg had them ratcheting back up to a combined average of 10 a day.

So Columbine officials have designed an event to let students "Take Back the School." At the media summit, it was announced that students and staff would gather at 7:30 a.m. Monday for a rally. After a rousing speech from Principal Frank DeAngelis, the half-mast flag will be raised full-staff for the first time since April 20, symbolically ending the period of mourning. A ribbon around the school will then be cut, and DeAngelis will lead students and faculty in to retake their school. The controversial part was a plan to put the students inside a safe zone surrounded by an enormous human chain of parents and alumni.

"What's the human chain for?" asked a reporter.

"To shield the students from you folk," said Rick Kaufman, district communications director. He added that a small media pool -- two fixed TV cameras, one print reporter, one print photographer and one radio reporter -- would be escorted into the interior to transmit the story to the hundreds of reporters huddled outside.

Reporters quickly protested, insisting that even the White House doesn't limit its pool that tightly. But Kaufman stood firm: "This is what it is." And he told them the press pool itself was a bargaining chip, designed to ensure compliance with the district's next set of demands: no helicopters, no rooftop photographers and no breach of school grounds. "If we can't get agreement then there's no pool," he said.

Media folks were outraged at the limited pool access. "You've gone to great lengths to create a wonderful image of opening day," a senior national print correspondent said. "If you want to change the image of your school, you need to let us see and hear that so that we can describe it to our readers." He argued that a pool would produce "a very flat, a very one-dimensional kind of projection, which I think is antithetical to what you're trying to achieve."

Kaufman acknowledged the problem, but explained that his back was to the wall from angry parents who objected even to a media pool. "Parents and faculty, they have really hit the wall with you folks. They're saying, 'We're done! Enough is enough.'"

Media reps were undaunted. "As long as parents understand that by saying no to everything, again it's going to be a situation where we're coming out of rocks and stuff in order to get sound and pictures," a TV executive said. "And I wonder if the parents really understand, if they think they control us by just saying no, they're really not, they're forcing us to go in other directions."

By Thursday, the district had agreed to a compromise, borrowed from media-weary survivors of the Oklahoma City explosion: A press "bullpen" will be set up within the planned human shield, between the parking lot and the rally point. Reporters will be cordoned off within the bullpen throughout the day, where interested students can stop to talk on their way to and from school. The press pool was also expanded by two members. In return, participating press organizations have agreed not to approach students for interviews on school grounds, or to photograph any of the injured students.

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