Isolated
Case or System Failure?
The
most critical questions of the Virginia Tech
shootings are going unasked. Why did Virginia's
mental health agencies let Seung-Hui Cho fall
between the cracks? Is anyone else at risk?
After
the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech on April 16
2007,
Virginia's mental
health system, campus security, and campus
emergency response have been subject to close
scrutiny. So far, however, no one has
seen fit to examine how well the Virginia Tech
tragedy was covered by the media.
Four
newspapers provided significant coverage of the
Virginia Tech tragedy: the Roanoke Times,
the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Virginian
Pilot, and the Washington Post. In the
first hours and for the first several days after
the shootings, reporters on those newspapers did
exactly what they were supposed to do: They got to
the scene quickly, constructed timelines,
identified the shooter, and interviewed his
roommates and firsthand witnesses.
Since
then, the media has done a poor job of reporting
on Virginia's public mental health
system. Reporters have failed, for instance, to
connect the dots between the Virginia Tech
massacre and other shootings such as the 2006
assassination of two police officers in the
Fairfax County, also by a mentally ill man.
Journalists also have accepted the excuses of the New
River Valley Community Services Board that
insufficient funding was the reason why the
board stopped participating in many judicial mental
health hearings as required by law.
Public
attention has rightly focused on the fact that
Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, fell
between the cracks of Virginia's mental health
system. If he'd been helped, the tragedy
potentially could have been averted. To its
credit, the media did hone in on the question of
why Cho never received his court-ordered
outpatient treatment. But no one questioned the
official answers.
According
to Tom Geib, director of Prince William's Community
Services Board, and Dr. Les Salzburg, director of
the New River Valley Community Services Board, the
failure was someone else's fault. The funds did not exist for the
boards to fully participate in judicial mental
health hearings and follow up on court-ordered
treatment.
No
reporter ever asked the question, "Where
in your meeting minutes is the record of your
decision to
stop setting up treatment plans for mentally ill
patients released into the community for
outpatient care?"
Reporters
generally are not experts on mental health quality
control, nor should they be, but a good reporter
knows how to talk to the
right people and ask the right questions. Yet
Virginia's press corps accepted the word of mental
health administrators at face value. No one ever mentioned the
quality control requirements on the New River
Valley Community Services Board -- which the board
boasts about on its web
page.
The
New River Valley mental health board has a special type of
accreditation called CARF (Committee on
Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities). On the
board's website a stylized CARF
Accreditation logo indicates, "Its programs
and services are of the highest quality,
measurable, and accountable".
What's a
reporter supposed to get from that? Well, as
the journalism school mantra goes, "Follow
the money!" Community Services Boards are
making a lot of noise about, and spending a lot of
taxpayer dollars on, the
benefits of quality control. A clever reporter
would find someone to discuss the quality control
system in the New River Valley and what went
wrong.
The
breakdown in treating Cho, it appears, occurred in
QA (Quality Assurance). A key tenet of QA is
to elevate the priority of critical issues until
they are resolved. Who was the person in charge of
Quality Assurance at the New River Valley
Community Services Board?
The
papers didn't say. It's unlikely any reporter ever
asked, or knew to ask, or know who to talk to
understand why they should ask. Perhaps some
reporter was interested but he/she readers wouldn't be interested. Conceivably,
someone made an editorial decision not to report
on quality control on the grounds that it was just
too boring.
Was it too boring?
Could a good reporter, or a good editor, or a good
newspaper figure out a good way to make the topic
interesting? I think the answer is yes.
To be blunt, the
Richmond Times-Dispatch, the
Roanoke Times, the Virginian Pilot, and the
Washington Post dropped
the ball, journalistically speaking. I
think they did everything they needed to sell
papers, and if that was their primary mission,
they accomplished it. But they fell short when reporting the whole story, and
in doing so, they robbed history.
The media
in Virginia seems to view their role
in the developing story of the Virginia Tech
Tragedy as a passive one rather than an
active one. New River Valley Community
Services Board was only one of 40 community
mental health boards in Virginia. Are the
other thirty-nine boards in compliance with the
Virginia laws about emergency mental health
judicial hearings?
Did a reporter from the
Danville
Register-Bee pick up the telephone and
call Lenard D. Lacke, executive director Danville
Pittsylvania Community Services, and ask if that
community services board is in compliance with
Virginia law about emergency mental health
judicial hearings? Did the Culpeper Star-Exponent
call Executive Director
Ron Branscome at the Rappahannock Area Community
Services Board and ask about compliance?
Here
is the basic question that astute reporters in
every corner of Virginia should have asked: Is every community services board in the
state of Virginia so under-funded that it is out
of compliance with Virginia mental health law? Or
are only some boards out of compliance? Or, is the
problem limited to the New River
Valley Community Services Board?
Of
all the reporters who cover community mental
health in Virginia, arguably Cyntha Pegram of the
Lynchburg News & Advance is the most
experienced.
She has been covering Central Virginia Community
Services for more than 15 years. Yet I have
seen no evidence that even Ms. Pegram asked the critical question of Central
Virginia Community Services, "Is your
agency in compliance with the law, and can you
document with the quality records you keep that
you are in compliance?"
The
journalists who cover community mental health
agencies in Virginia are content, it seems, to let
government administrators and elected officials
lead them around the nose. Journalists, who fancy
themselves the tellers of truth to power, are not
questioning whether mental health administrators
are exercising lax oversight of their agencies.
Virginia's
editorial writers are the
first to pound the table and demand
accountability. But there will NEVER be any
accountability until the owners and editors of
Virginia's Newspapers set and keep a higher
standard of reporting on public mental health
issues.
--
June 19, 2007
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