In light of what happened in New Town, perhaps the media could be forgiven a little "excess" when it comes to covering school violence. But let's not kid ourselves about something else: This large-scale, mushrooming coverage -- TV; radio; etc. -- actually serves as a potential "reward" for those seeking extreme coverage, either as the famous, or infamous!

In yesterday's coverage, the worst stuff were the interviews with kids and parents about their feelings; now granted, I did like that one lady who said this was just the latest incident and that she'd earlier had trouble with both teachers and administrators at the school ... and was thinking of putting her little ray-of-sunshine in a private school! You go, girl!

Course ... this ALL happened in the APS! This is the same District, of course, where teachers and administrators and students assisted each other in cheating on standardized tests; and then, of course, many of them were found "not guilty." Sure!

AND, it is Errol Davis' district!

If two wrongs don't make a right, what do three wrongs make?

Cheating and getting away with it; humiliating the retiring principal with the po-po escort out the door; and now violence at the middle school!

APS: Time for Errol to go back to his "other" successful career! (Don't ask, because darling, I don't know!)

Back to the media coverage ...

It's so indescribably bad, exploitative and wreckless, I don't even know where to begin in trying to fix it!

But I am sure of this: Racy, irresponsible media coverage has HURT our public policy process MORE than it has helped! Perhaps the advertisers don't care, but maybe the public should!

Can the public, somehow, get journalists and the media back into "responsible" mode?!

As things stand now, the media response we see is likely to actually cause more "bad outcomes" as various actors are drawn to the certain high-intensity of know-nothing journalism and journalists ...

Rodney King asked, "Can't we all get along?"

But maybe he should have said: "Can't we all just turn that [filtered word] off?"