Houston paper buries lead in sob-sister story about illegal's suicide
By John David Powell (09/03/08)
The lead is one of the hardest, yet most essential, elements to a news story. It sets the tone for the article and captures the reader’s interest by using a minimum number of words. And speaking of minimum, the good lead offers, at minimum, the meat of the story: the who, the what, the when, and the where. The why and the how come later.
Journalists learn lead writing in Journalism 101 classes. They hone their skill through class assignments. They perfect the art with the help of editors or producers.
So what happened at the Houston Chronicle last week? Someone either (1) forgot how to write a lead or (2) the Chronicle, once again, demonstrated its penchant for shoddy writing and agenda journalism. Of course, neither alternative is mutually exclusive.
Here’s what readers gleaned from the first three paragraphs of the front-page story of the city/state section under the headline, “Teen’s hanging in jail fuels many questions”: 17-year-old Arturo Chavez sat dead in solitary confinement in the Galveston County, Texas, jail after twisting a blanket into a noose around his neck within 48 hours of his arrest on an initial charge of making an illegal left turn.
Three paragraphs to tell us a 17-year-old may have committed suicide in the county jail after a traffic stop.
By the end of the fourth paragraph, the reader gets the idea this will not be a story about an apparent jail suicide, but rather a sob-sister account of an illegal alien from Guatemala who spent much of his time improving his English and working to send money to the folks back home.
The fifth graph introduces his older brother who says Chavez killed himself because he was “so beaten down he couldn’t take the pain.” And then, if the reader had any doubts of the paper’s agenda, the sixth paragraph tosses them out by explaining that Chavez’s life was similar to those untold others who “live in the shadows” because of their immigration status.
Reading on in the eighth graph, we learn his parents filed a federal lawsuit against the police department, the county, and the county sheriff alleging authorities didn’t do enough to prevent the suicide.
The paper devotes the next 16 (count them, 16) paragraphs on Chavez’s dissatisfaction with his tips from loading baggage at a Guatemalan bus station; the 15 days he spent sneaking into Mexico and the U.S.; the $3,500 he and his family and friends forked over to coyotes; his rise from busboy to waiter at an unnamed restaurant owned by Mario Garcia (yes, the story named the owner, but not the restaurant); the $100 a week Chavez sent home; his classes to learn English; his pride of Guatemala, the U.S., and his Mayan heritage, his happiness with his 15-year-old girl friend; and his traffic stop.
Not until paragraph 25, more than halfway into the story, do we learn Chavez was in the U.S. illegally with no driver’s license or auto insurance, and in possession of a fake identification card. And then, the paper takes two more paragraphs before describing how Chavez escaped from jail, scrambled up a wire-topped fence that cut his hands as he resisted arrest, and how police had to zap him twice with a taser and thwack him several times in the head with a baton before he gave up.
The remaining 16 paragraphs reflect the tone of the first 24 by painting an illegal immigrant who escaped from jail and resisted capture, who endangered lives and property, and who carried what may have been someone’s stolen identity as a hard worker whose poor family had to raise the cash to return his body to Guatemala .
There is nothing wrong with telling Chavez’s story to explain why the young man chose to kill himself rather than wait for the court to release him so he could continue his voluntary life in the shadows. The Houston Chronicle, however, did a great disservice to its readers and to all legal immigrants and naturalized citizens by burying Chavez’s criminal activities and by portraying him as an innocent victim of a racist and uncaring society that beat him down until suicide was the only way to stop his pain.
I don’t have a problem with well-written, sob-sister, agenda journalism. Just don’t put tripas on a plate and serve it as tournedos.
John David Powell
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