behind the news

Is It Life Imitating Art — Or Is It Journalism?

Few subjects in life bring out the trend-mongering instinct in a reporter like misbehaving teenagers.
August 2, 2006

Few subjects in life bring out the trend-mongering instinct in a reporter like misbehaving teenagers. Show us a teenager doing something profoundly dumb, and we’ll show you some breathy, excitable journalist ready to translate the youthful stupidity into a national threat.

Take the case of Michael G. Jackson (no, not that Michael Jackson) and USA Today.

In May, several news organizations including the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Associated Press reported that police in Arlington, Texas had arrested the 18-year-old Jackson and several of his peers for their role in producing a series of DVDs called “Agg Townz Fights.”

“Police have arrested four teens accused of selling DVDs they made of students fighting in neighborhoods, outside schools, inside a fast-food restaurant and even in the street as cars tried to drive by,” reported the Associated Press.

“Among the scenes in the two-hour video called ‘Agg Townz Fights, Part II,’ complete with a rap music soundtrack, are girls punching each other, a boy hitting a girl who falls down and two boys who shake hands after bare-fisted boxing,” added the AP.

Over the past several months, local news outlets in Texas have done an admirable job of covering every angle of the story. The Star-Telegram, for instance, has filed more than 15 stories related to the sociopath auteur, ranging from how the videos were promoted (in part, on MySpace) to the players involved (a loosely organized gang called “Playas After Cash”) to how the arrests had impacted sales of the videos (the price went up from $15 to $20).

Sign up for CJR's daily email

Enter USA Today.

Yesterday, more than two months after the news broke, the newspaper arrived on the scene. Rather than simply admitting its tardiness and acknowledging the work of local reporters, USA Today did what any self-respecting big-footed national news organization would do facing a similar situation. It repackaged the story as a ham-handed national trend piece.

The story begins with two “bare-knuckle brawlers” from “Agg Townz Fights 2” beating on each other outside. “Their ring: the grassy schoolyard of Seguin High School here,” reports USA Today. “They’re engaged in a disturbing extreme sport that has popped up across the nation: teen fight clubs.”

Thus begins the first in a series of sloppy analogies. Never mind that there are no uniforms, no teams, no referees, no rules, no records to chase after — according to USA Today, it’s an “extreme sport,” not the deranged behavior of a few young psychos.

Cue the perfunctory “across the country” graph.

“But it’s not just in Junction City that these fight clubs are popping up,” reports USA Today. “Across the country, kids are taking their cue from Hollywood and from movies like Fight Club with Brad Pitt.”

Ooops, scratch that. The above paragraph actually comes from ABC’s recent trend piece on the danger of teenage fight clubs.

Here’s what USA Today has to say: “This year, authorities in Texas, New Jersey, Washington state and Alaska have discovered more than a half-dozen teen fight rings operating for fun — or profit. These illegal, violent, often bloody bouts pit boys and girls, some as young as 12, in hand-to-hand combat.”

From there, USA Today labors to establish the ecumenical and far-ranging appeal of such clubs, which, according to the paper, are not just for poor kids and nut jobs.

“Many fight-club brawlers are suburban high school kids, not gang members or juvenile criminals,” notes USA Today. “Chase Leavitt, son of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, was arrested for participating in a fight club at a Mormon church gym in Salt Lake City in December 2001, when his father was Utah’s governor … According to [the chief prosecutor], Chase Leavitt laced up boxing gloves and punched it out with a 17-year-old opponent at the church, which is in an affluent neighborhood. Organizers handed out fliers advertising the fight. About 100 students from Leavitt’s East High School paid admission before cops raided the premises.”

Fliers … paid admission … boxing gloves.

If that sounds more like an amateur boxing match to you than a fight club, you probably haven’t been reading enough trend pieces. Ever since the 1999 debut of the movie Fight Club, practically any act of teenage fisticuffs counts as a fight club. Back yard wrestling … fight club. Mob violence … fight club. Schoolyard brawl … fight club. Unsupervised martial arts … fight club. Teenager on teenager torture … fight club.

No matter how clunky the comparison, it all comes back to Fight Club. Witness USA Today‘s strained efforts to compare the situation in Arlington to the Brad Pitt vehicle.

“The fictional fight club led by Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, in the 1999 movie was made up mostly of men in their twenties who made a sadistic and masochistic sport out of fighting one another,” writes USA Today. “Durden’s main rule for his club became the movie’s signature line and a slogan in popular culture: You do not talk about Fight Club. Teen fight clubs in Arlington often and elsewhere follow that advice, and police and school authorities have been frustrated by the wall of silence that has surrounded the clubs.”

Wall of silence?

Remember, this is a story about teenagers filming attacks on other teenagers and selling the resulting DVDs on the Internet.

Finally, no fight-club trend piece would be complete without a quote from an academic, wringing his hands about the state of America’s youth.

“This does seem a phenomenon of the Mortal Kombat, violent video game generation,” a cultural anthropology professor at Duke University tells USA Today. “The fight club offers the chance to bring those fantasies of violence and danger to life — and maybe have your 15 minutes of fame in an underground video.”

But is there any actual evidence that today’s teenagers are any more proportionally violent than teenagers of the past? Apparently not, since USA Today fails to provide any hard numbers.

All of which makes us wonder: Is it the teenagers who are guilty of badly imitating Hollywood? Or is it the journalists?

Felix Gillette writes about the media for The New York Observer.