Sunday, May 10, 2009
Hunting footage evokes various emotions
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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As the executive director for the YMCA of Roanoke Valley, Cal Johnson has plenty on his plate.
Things like making sure facilities are well-equipped and safe.
Ensuring programs are appropriate and carefully managed.
Managing a large staff of full- and part-time employees.
And taking personal responsibility for the satisfaction of the Y's roughly 20,000 members.
And that personal ownership is why Johnson found himself spending hours recently dealing with a single complaint from a member.
It started with a TV, or rather, the five TVs that hang from the ceiling in the Kirk Family YMCA's main exercise room.
The TVs are always tuned to five different channels, and the volume is off.
Members who are riding stationary bikes, or using treadmills or elliptical trainers, can plug their headphones in to a jack on the machine and tune in the audio of the station that interests them.
Makes sense, right?
Well, a couple of early-morning exercisers at the facility are avid sportsmen. And, like many avid outdoorsmen, when they can't be out there in the woods or on the water, they like to watch other people out there in the woods or on the water.
In this case, the TV shows are on the Versus network, a sports channel that mixes some hunting- and fishing-related programming in with its coverage of things like NHL hockey and the bicycle races.
As those of us who watch those shows know, sometimes animals get shot.
Which is what led to a complaint from another early-morning exerciser, who told Johnson that she was offended by the shows.
She wanted them off the air.
The sportsmen weren't wavering, either. How could it be offensive if it airs on a basic cable station in the morning, they asked?
Welcome to our world, Mr. Johnson.
Readers who follow our Letters to the Editor section have seen quite a bit of ink on this topic the past few weeks.
It started with a letter from a reader who was offended by the small hunting pictures that sometimes run on the second page of the paper's main section. The pictures, such as these particular shots of a couple of youth hunters, are reader-submitted shots I have posted on my blog, which has a strong hunting and fishing flavor.
This particular letter drew extra ire from sportsmen in large part because the writer tried to insinuate that children whose parents take them hunting could be more prone to criminal violence when they get older.
Like plenty of what we get from the extreme animal rights movement, that hyperbolic claim is offensive, outrageous and cannot be supported by any credible scientific evidence. So hunters had a right to be upset.
They wrote rebuttals.
And those rebuttals drew rebuttals.
And that's all fine.
The letters section is a place where readers get to state their opinions. Other readers will agree with some, and disagree with others.
Reporters do read letters, but they don't unduly influence what we cover and how we cover it.
Ultimately we must rely on our own and our editors' judgement to produce coverage that reflects the community. Letters can add context to that community, but can't define it.
While hunting might not be as huge as it once was in this region, it remains an important part of the community in Western Virginia. So hunting coverage -- and hero shots of hunters of all ages -- have a place in the pages of The Roanoke Times.
But does hunting footage have a place in an exercise facility?
Johnson, who is not a hunter, set his DVR to record some of the shows in question, and he watched them all.
Yes, animals got shot. But the shows were mostly "Just guys casting their lines into the water," he told me.
As he watched the shows, Johnson had to be thinking that if he bowed to this demand, what would he do when another member came to him and claimed offense at CNN? Or Fox News? Or The View?
Johnson made the right call: The station was staying.
Part of what makes the YMCA special, he told me, is its diverse membership.
Being part of that membership, I agree.
Put a hunter and an anti-hunter on stationary bikes next to each other and maybe they can each gain a little insight into why the other is the way they are, and that's not a bad thing.
But that won't happen in this case.
Apparently, the complainer wasn't interested in diversity.
She quit.
