OU Daily editorial board on Hinrichs stone: WHATEVER!

In typical smarmy fashion, the OU Daily editorial staff have concluded that a paving stone featuring dead bomber Joel Henry Hinrichs III's name on it, and placed on university property, is not worthy of a news story. In the following editorial, linked here, the staff heaps scorn on those of us who actually ASKED QUESTIONS about the Hinrichs case. And now that the Oklahoman has made the university's paper of record look bad, they have decided to cover their embarrassment with an air of superiority - "Oh, the Hinrichs stone? We're above all that. Let the rabble get into a snit about it. We're too busy covering stories about Sonic Drive-In, etc.

Here it is ...

Oklahoma Daily editorial staff
Posted: April 27, 2007
http://www.hub.ou.edu

Our View: Memorial honoring Joel Hinrichs sparks fake controversy in media

In an unfortunate twist of events, news media have flashed back to a year and a half ago and started a minor controversy in the shadow of an unfortunate event.
Oklahoma City media outlets have jumped on a shocking discovery: Joel Hinrichs III, the OU student who blew himself up on the South Oval in October 2005, has a stone commemorating him on the Oklahoma Memorial Union patio.
We admit, it's strange and not necessarily in the best of tastes.
But at the same time, whatever. Despite a major scare, the Hinrichs tragedy affected mostly the Hinrichs family and OU administrators. So if they want to make that decision, whatever.

The problem that has arisen, however, is that message boards and talking heads have reborn what we hoped had died: non-factual rumor-milling and general salacious gum-flapping.
"That damn Muslim terrorist done tried to kill us all!" we expect to hear a few people say. Message boards already become home to similarly nonfactual nonsense. That's why we wish sleeping dogs could have been kept asleep, even hit over the head with a bucket of golf balls, if need be.
And, before we hear cries of being in President Boren's pocket, we merely shared his frustration a year and a half ago when racist Web sites, fake journalists (which KWTV-9's Tamara Pratt managed to devolve into) and couch commentators teamed up for one of the free world's most gratuitous spectacles of misinformation, rumor-spewing and fear-mongering ... ever.

Meanwhile, here's why we didn't do a front page story today: Johnny Journalist is assigned to write the story. He receives OU's official statements, he talks to Joel Hinrichs Jr. and then it becomes time for him to test the waters of public opinion and pick out a few good quotes. But what does Ol' Johnny have to do to get those? Johnny has to go stand by the stone outside of the union and wait for people to pass by."Excuse me, my name is Johnny Journalist, and I was wondering if you had seen this stone here on the ground?"
"Nope. Which one?"
"The one that reads ‘Joel H. Hinrichs III,' who was the guy who blew himself up on campus last year. Do you have a comment?"
And within three seconds of learning of this fact, the student is asked to give an emotional reaction to a controversy that is only a controversy because media have made it a controversy.
Do Johnny's antics sound familiar? Yup. They sound just like what each local TV news outfit did two or three times Thursday.
We didn't feel it necessary to participate.
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