Leaping to Conclusions

At last. A national news story that makes Seattle look awful, and Paul Schell has nothing to do with it.

A woman's private torment became a city's Rorschach test a couple of weeks ago when, after hours of indecision, she jumped from I-5's ship canal bridge. Fortunately, she lived. Unfortunately, so did the story--which circled the globe--that while she teetered on the edge, trying to decide whether to live, countless angry, frustrated commuters bombarded her with obscenity-laden demands that she die.

That was the story. But the real story, globally and especially in Seattle, was media's handling of the story.

Most local media outlets reminded us of how sensitive and respectful they were to the woman and her loved ones--which wasn't especially true, but it's also not the point. The problems were quite a bit more serious, and evident throughout the story's arc.

Locally, that arc had four distinct phases. Initially--during and after the woman's tense standoff--most of the coverage focused on the closure of I-5, and on the mass inconvenience--not that a person's life was in the balance.

Then, when police announced that they'd closed the freeway down partially due to the taunting of passersby, the story went ballistic. But was it a story? The impression left by most media coverage was that the taunting was non- stop. But in an interview the following afternoon on All Things Considered (!), SPD spokesperson Clem Benton--also widely quoted locally--acknowledged, in response to a direct question, that the jeers only occurred "four or five" times--still appalling, but over the course of almost four hours, or even the first 40 minutes, hardly a barrage.

The distinction is important. Even if dozens of people urged the woman to jump, it's neither unusual for a public suicide nor an insight into Seattle's (or urban America's) alienation. And that was the whole point of the story: how awful people have become, a thesis far too many of us are willing to believe at the drop of a hat.

It also fed here into Seattle's tendency to obsessively navel-gaze. Somehow, every major local story--WTO, dot.coms, Mardi Gras, Boeing's fleeing executives, a woman urged to jump--has to become an insight into Seattle's soul or state or psychosis or some such pop psychology nonsense. Our four- county metropolitan area has over three million people in it; characterizing us all on the basis of twenty (or four) assholes is preposterous.

It's also wrong, which led to local media's phase three: the thumb-sucking, feel-good "We really ARE okay! We really DO care!" stories that are equally inevitable, and equally inaccurate. We don't care. Few people want anyone to die unnecessarily, but as individuals, we all have our own lives to lead and rarely reach out to strangers; societally, our lack of support, services, or understanding for people suffering from mental health crises or illnesses (along with most other people on society's margins) is scandalous. For Christ's sake--one of Seattle's leading mayoral candidates, Mark Sidran, built his career bashing and criminalizing people who often have mental health problems. Hello?

That--not isolated road rage--is the lack of civility in this story, and it was entirely ignored. Even within the coverage itself, the assumption that the suicidal woman was in control of her choices--which we most decidedly did not know--was everywhere. But fleeting, because in the end, what we cared about in the story was that it was about us--not her.

And the theme that was an insistent part of all the coverage took on a life of its own in phase four--when the story flared up again after a nationally syndicated shock jock revealed the name of the woman and her boyfriend on the air. Horrors! Hand-wringing! We, the virtuous local media, would never stoop so low! Even though, out of all the suicide attempts that litter our unfortunate society, we've already exploited this woman's misery for a couple weeks in our quest for ratings, we would never do anything to add to her misery like that!

As the Mission of Burma once sang, "that's when I reach for my revolver..."

For all the talk that our cruel taunting shows that Seattle is a big city (duh...), the media response shows that at heart, its civic culture is still small town: continually obsessed with our image and how others view us. It was ever thus; WTO would never have happened had civic leaders not been in adecades-long frenzy to host major sporting and trade events as proof, somehow, that we're not simply "livable," but a "world class city." After 40 years of focusing on what others think of us, these buffoons--check our mayoral campaign for proof--have destroyed Seattle's livability. And we still get worked up over our media's sensationalizing of one woman's misery and the resulting traffic jam.

World class cities aren't defined by a few rude motorists. And in a story where just about every news outlet in the city fed us self-congratulatory pap about how ethically aware they were, few cared about the ethics of spending days first encouraging us to believe the worst about ourselves, then reassuring us that we really are wonderful after all, when neither conclusion followed from what actually happened. One person handled a broken relationships badly; a few people handled a traffic jam badly. The rest of the story was pure invention.