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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: Drive-By Journalism By Mike Males Other than ultra-quotable crime experts such as Princeton's John ("adolescent superpredator") DiIulio and Northeastern University's James Alan ("teenage crime storm") Fox, few individuals have contributed more to the inflammatory and systematic misportrayal of teenage crime in American than Rolling Stone magazine's contributing editor Randall Sullivan. Sullivan's fact-lite, anecdote-laden style specialized in blowing up extremely rare, bizarre murders by a few upscale kids into an unwarranted image of modern teenagers as "the most damaged and disturbed generation the country has ever produced" (Rolling Stone, 10/1/98). His language was panicked ("how truly and terribly lost we are"--9/17/98), his evidence lacking, his perspective nil. While Rolling Stone editors gushed that Sullivan's "River's Edge theory of reporting" is a "tutorial for journalists who want to get to the marrow of a story about teens" (10/1/98), in fact he was an entertainer profiling vanishingly uncommon glam-crimes. His worst sin (a plague among anecdote-loving reporters) was a penchant for asserting terrifying trends and apocalyptic dementia in an entire generation based on some misfit-preppie-wastoid slaying that he picked to profile precisely because it was so oddball. Sullivan initially sought to train his "discordant" journalism on privileged, suburban youths he reasoned were the most warped by the Reagan era's celebration of greed, me-first "bubble of self-deception," and "fusion of hysteria and hypocrisy." When more "homicides and suicides...took place among those who were not only young, but white and well off," he summed up, Reagan's happy-face Morning-in-America cultural bookkeeping (like his economic schemes) stood arraigned of deceitful "creative accounting" (Rolling Stone, 6/11/92). To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1447 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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