The media didn’t ‘go postal’
Fears that the news media would bring back the ‘going postal’ stereotype in the wake of the Goleta killings have so far not, for the most part, come true.
A Google news search for ‘going postal’ the day after the incident turned up a large number of hits, but the vast majority came from an Associated Press story that was carried on many sites, often more than once as it was updated with new developments. The AP dispatches mention, fairly deep in the story, that a series of killings in the 80’s gave rise to the phrase.
One version of the AP story says “The term has been part of popular culture since 1986″, which is not true. In fact, it was not until well into the 90’s that the phrase started appearing in print. The first citation I could find was in December 1993, in a newspaper article describing a symposium on workplace violence sponsored by the postal service. A couple of months later, it showed up in an issue of Wired magazine, in the ‘Jargon Watch’ section. That lends some credence to the idea that the first use of the phrase was among techies on the Well, the pioneering online discussion forum, and then spread to Usenet, the loose network of discussion groups that pretty much WAS the Internet in the days before the World Wide Web. (Yes kids, there was a time before the web!) A search of the Google Usenet archives dates the online use of the phrase to February 15, 1994, when it was used to describe a shooting at a Wendy’s. The fact that it was included in ‘Jargon Watch’ is an indication that it was not in widespread use. And it was not a ‘postal massacre’ that made ‘going postal’ a common expression, but the 1995 film ‘Clueless’.
Back to the media: most of the network and cable news reports reviewed were very respectful, and a text search of transcripts turned up no instances of ‘going postal’ or its variants. Instead of rolling out the stereotypes, the reports mostly just accurately portrayed the shock and sadness. Kyra Phillips of CNN closes out one report with “…make a point to honor the five employees that were killed” before reading the names of the employees. Wolf Blitzer says “… our prayers go out. I hope she’ll recover…” after a story on the sixth victim, who at the time was still clinging to life.
There were two examples of postal stereotyping that merit a brief mention- one from a traditional media outlet, the other from a political blog.
The media example is TV station KESQ in Palm Springs. The version of the story posted online starts out:
“Scenes like the one in Goleta bring to mind the pop culture term “going postal.” Just why do our mail carriers kill? NewsChannel 3 went looking for answers about why so many postal employees “go postal.”
And goes downhill from there. No facts, obviously, to support the assertion that “so many” postal employees are killers. (And don’t even bother to tell them that the Goleta incident did not involve ‘mail carriers’.)
The punch line? After a slapdash piece with absolutely no “facts”, frightening or otherwise, the “reporter” reaches the breathless conclusion that “Despite the frightening facts, many postal employees believe the violence has more to do with the individual rather than where they work.”
Imagine that?
There were actually quite a few blogs that had references to “going postal” shortly after the killings took place, but most were from the kind of blogs that make Howard Stern look witty and urbane. The one that surprised me was a posting on TPM Cafe, the companion blog to Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, a leading liberal blog. Let me stipulate that my political opinions are very similar to TPM’s- however:
TMP’s Matthew Yglesias responded to the cold blooded murder of six innocent human beings with this:
“It’s not really funny, but then again it sort of is funny, when a “former postal employee” lives up to stereotype with a little spree killing action, “killing six people and critically wounding another before committing suicide.” It’s enough to make you wonder if there might be some factual basis to the notion that postal workers are unusually likely to go on a rampage (recall that Newman on Seinfeld explained that this happens “because the mail never stops”). Perhaps Mark Kleiman, the blogosphere’s resident criminologist, can enlighten us. While we’re waiting he has a post on a more serious crime control issue that’s worth a read.”
So six people being murdered is ’sorta funny’? Can you imagine the convulsions of laughter he must have gone through on 9/11? But never mind those wacky postal people dying- read up on “a more serious crime control issue”.
This from a guy who claims to have a Harvard degree in philosophy, and to have written for the New York Times. We’ll leave Matty with the comment one of his own readers posted: “Matt, there’s a certain variety of humor which works when wisecracking with your friends, but makes you look really, really bad when it is forever enshrined in the google cache. Making light of mass-murder pretty clearly falls into that category.”
Those two glaring, but thankfully low circulation examples aside, it does seem that as Bill Burrus said the other day, “by and large, the press has not used this terrible event to portray all postal employees as violent and that the media has refrained from using the term “going postal” in relation to this tragedy.”
Lets hope it continues.
