Posted on 10/13/2003 6:37:24 AM PDT by condi2008
CBS National News ran a negative homeschooling report last night titled "The Dark Side of Homeschooling" and will run a further report this evening. The reports focus on a handful of child abuse cases during the past 5 to 10 years involving families claiming to be homeschoolers.
Last night's segment discussed the murder of Kyle, 13, and Marnie Warren, 19, by their brother Brandon, 14, and his subsequent suicide. The Warren family is from Johnston County North Carolina.
To view the CBS story go to: http://www.hslda.org/elink.asp?ID=1139
Missing from the CBS story was that: Social Services had contacted the family eleven times, were well aware of the condition of the home and had been working with the family.
However, to any fair-minded reader the story leaves the impression that homeschooling equals child abuse.
We are outraged that CBS would ignore the obvious facts and draw the erroneous conclusion that homeschoolers need to be strictly regulated. The story is a shameless attempt to smear an entire community of committed, dedicated parents.
The real story is CBS's bias against homeschooling and it is using this distorted story to encourage the regulation of homeschoolers.
Please call Viacom (parent company of CBS) and CBS to express your opposition to the biased reporting and smear campaign against homeschooling. Highlight the fact that homeschooling was not the cause of the childrens' deaths and that you expect CBS to have higher journalistic standards.
Viacom President and CEO - Mel Karmazin
P - 212-258-6000
CBS Evening News - LA Bureau
P - (323) 575-2202
Sincerely,
J. Michael Smith
HSLDA President
Home School Defender: CBS Used Tragedy to Push Regulation
Jim Brown and Jenni Parker
Agape Press
The CBS Evening News is being accused of taking a cheap shot at home schooling.
In the first of a two-part series on what CBS News calls "a dark side to home schooling," correspondent Vince Gonzales highlighted an isolated case in rural North Carolina where a teenage boy committed suicide after killing his brother and sister in their squalid trailer home. The parents of the two children had reportedly been home schooling them, and were under investigation by the Department of Social Services for abuse and neglect.
Mike Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association (hslda.org) (HSLDA), believes CBS used the tragic case to push for government regulation of home schooling.
"What does home schooling have to do with this? Nothing," Smith says, adding, "The only thing that [the media] can point to is that these folks were alleged home schoolers."
Smith says he does not think the parents in the CBS news story ever even attempted to comply with state home-schooling association guidelines, something his group is attempting to verify. In any event, he feels CBS News is taking an isolated incident out of its true context to bolster its case against home schooling.
"We're trying to figure out why they've taken this situation to try to support their position, because it doesn't do it," Smith says. He believes that instead of operating on a factual basis and reporting the news fairly, CBS was using emotionalism in the hope of sparking public outrage against the home schooling movement.
Smith feels the CBS reports are deflecting attention and concern from where they should be focused. "I'm trying to figure out why this turns against home schooling rather than against the Department of Social Services," he says, "because they're responsible for protecting children."
Smith points out that the system in place requires Social Services to investigate abuse and neglect, which that department claims to have done. "It appears to me that the conclusion CBS is making of these facts is totally illogical," he says.
The HSLDA was established to defend and advance the constitutional right of parents to direct the education of their children and to protect family freedoms. The legal defense group has been involved in a number of home schooling disputes in North Carolina, including the recently resolved Stumbo case, in which the state's Supreme Court finally ruled against the Department of Child Protective Services and in favor of safeguarding the privacy of home-schooling parents.
According to Smith, the Stumbo case was significant because North Carolina's high court found that social workers are obligated to examine reports alleging abuse or neglect to make sure they rise to the level as defined by the law before initiating an investigation.
The HSLDA president feels that every anonymous report of abuse should not necessarily result in an investigation, but that social workers need to carefully scrutinize each report so that they will not subject families to unjustifiable trauma due to a trivial or false allegation. While the incidents reported in the recent CBS Evening News story were tragic and may have been a situation of actual abuse, Smith contends that the story has little or nothing to do with home schooling. He believes the media simply used that spurious connection for their own purposes, and is urging families to phone or e-mail CBS to complain about its "Eye on America" report.
© 2003 Agape Press.
Fundamentalist Christian whackos and racist right-wing bigots is the approach he'll take, I'd wager.
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