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ONE The Washington Post and the Sniper On October ≤∑, ≤≠≠≤, on the day after the arrests of John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, Washington Post columnist Marjorie Williams∞ began her op-ed piece with these words: ‘‘Now that two solid suspects are in custody for the killings that have dominated the region for the past three weeks, we may hope to recapture our everyday sense of safety. It is less obvious whether we can retrieve our dignity so fast.’’ Noting that she did not fault ‘‘any of those who took precautions to protect themselves or their loved ones,’’ Williams charged: ‘‘Over the past week, our public reactions to the killings—the media coverage, the poses of the authorities charged with ensuring our safety, the language in which we talked about the mystery man or men who held us in suspense—crossed an invisible but palpable line into social hysteria.’’ During the weeks between the initial killings and recognition of the existence of a sniper, and the capture of the two suspects, a quarter of a million words were published by the Post about the events. Williams’s column, one of the last in this remarkable string of reporting, acknowledged rational concern but also cautioned against overreaction. She ∞. Marjorie Williams attended Harvard University for two years, subsequently relocating to New York to start a career in publishing. She soon moved to journalism , becoming an editor for the Washington Post in ∞Ω∫∏. A year later, she began to make a name for herself in the Style section of the paper, and then in Vanity Fair, for her insightful portraits of Washington’s political elite. She also penned a weekly oped column in the Post from ≤≠≠≠ to November ≤≠≠∂. Diagnosed with liver cancer in ≤≠≠∞, she died shortly after writing her last column on January ∞∏, ≤≠≠∑, at forty-seven years of age. Her work has since been published in book form and has received numerous awards. (Sources: Washington Post, January ∞π, ≤≠≠∑, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A∞∂≤Ωπ-≤≠≠∑Jan∞∏.html; Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie—Williams.) ≤≤ on the trail of the d.c. sniper primarily questioned whether parents had not gone too far in their zeal to protect their children: When they wrote this threat (‘‘Your children are not safe anywhere at any time’’) at the end of a letter left at the scene of Saturday ’s shooting, we reacted with a dreadful lack of perspective. In fact, we already knew that the mysterious killer was willing to gun down a child; and in truth, we had shown ourselves pretty well able to protect most of our children in most places most of the time, precisely because they spend their days inside structures well regulated by public authorities. They are not the people who need to pump gas and drive buses and vacuum out minivans. It seemed obvious that the snipers’ threat against children was mostly an ominous afterthought (after all, it was contained in a ‘‘P.S.’’), thrown in to reinforce the fear that we had so vividly shown them they had the power to induce. At the time they first appeared, these passages seemed more an indictment of the media’s hyperbolic role in the events, but in actuality they slid toward a similar view of the public at large, in which Williams included herself, by writing in the first-person plural. And in pointing out that children had not been particularly vulnerable, Williams was arguing that the community’s anxiety had encouraged the sniper. Communicating the threat to children, she showed, actually increased society ’s sense of its own victimization. Williams then concluded with her solution. While she conceded that, given the snipers’ capture, her words assumed an aspect of omniscient hindsight, she also asserted that her readers should examine their reactions, labeling them self-pity that had overwhelmed fact: ‘‘Better to have dealt with and acted on our fears as the individual emotions they were, while at least trying to maintain a public attitude of greater stoicism.’’ And she made a passionate plea generally for courage , instead of fear, in the face of adversity, referencing the events of September ∞∞, ≤≠≠∞: We all need to understand these reactions to the extent they are forces in our own lives. But at some point it serves us very ill as a culture to dwell so fondly on our emotional injuries, which are not at all the same as the actual injuries of those who died or lost loved ones on that day, or...

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