Have you seen this yet? KATU is airing a melodramatic commercial for an “investigative” piece tonight that’s apparently all about how the Oregon State Hospital keeps on letting crazy people lumber free from decrepit cages to menace innocents and little children.
They’re pulling out all the stops: sinister music, a raspy narrator, gritty black-and-white footage—even a hallway confrontation between a reporter and a state official. Update! Here’s a YouTube embed; seems the KATU embed stopped working. Update again! And then the station’s YouTube embed went down, too. Curious. Very curious. I’ve left a message with the newsroom to find out what’s what. Another update! The Mental Health Association of Portland shrewdly made their own copy and posted it to YouTube. So it lives again.
Good for them and their gumshoe reporting, right? Wrong. Mental health advocates are ripping it as a bunch of stigmatizing, insensitive hogwash.
The Mental Health Association of Portland is calling the story “crap” and wants people to call KATU and raise hell:
The Mental Health Association of Portland has sifted through a lot of crap news stories about the Oregon State Hospital—but this looks to be a doozy.
What’s true? The hospital HAD four basic problems — decrepit and dangerous buildings, demoralized under-educated staff, stigma/fear/panic on the part of just about everyone but especially mental health providers and the media, and the association with Psychiatric Security Review Board.
Number one is resolved. Number two is changing fast. Number three, as evidenced by Dan Tilken‘s hysterical reporting above, is still a basic every day problem. Number four was addressed with major legislative changes in 2010.
Tonight KATU is the problem, not the solution. Too bad Dan couldn’t find a real story.
And here’s what the Multnomah County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness had to say:
KATU is running inflammatory, fear-mongering ad spots about people being treated at the state hospital. The key word in Oregon State Hospital is “hospital”—not prison—as KATU portrays.
Lucky for you, we’ve obtained an advance copy of KATU’s special report! It’s after the cut.
“The evil is gone from here… THE EVIL IS GONE!!!”
P.S. I know I’ve said in the past that KOIN is “the WORST” but I was wrong. KATU is and always shall be “THE WORST!!”
http://bit.ly/ruavFu
KATU is a stand-alone argument for the need to teach critical thinking in public schools.
You douchebags look almost like real journalists when compared with this shite.
Hey KATU–ever hear of a little phenomenon called DEINSTITUTIONALIZATION? That’s where–sometimes in the name of personal civil rights but more often in the name of budget–we release people from mental health centers, who are not really all that mentally healthy. Is the service facility responsible for that phenomenon? No. So why go to the hospital to bitch…especially when the people who ARE (were) responsible are all gathered in Salem this month?
K2 loves to play the fearmongering card. Last week, it was all, “Does a SEX OFFENDER live next door to YOU?” Seriously, they are pandering to the easily-outraged and obsessively fear-cripped, a.k.a. people who watch television news.
“Tonight, from the station that brought you a reporter sitting in a chair in a newly-installed bike lane at 11am to prove no one commutes via that bike lane…”
mental patients are on the loose…and commenting on blogtown!
“Prisoners” on the loose eh? I suspect that this “investigator” didn’t even get through the first couple of paragraphs of the relevant laws and procedures since it’s…. uh…. not a prison. The word is “patient” and that reporter should have his spooky music permission taken away for such fearmongering.
However, I will concede that some public attention to conditions at the hospital may be warranted. As an Investigative Blogtown Commenter, I did some research and found this relevant video of an ACTUAL ESCAPE from OSH: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3c2cXiEUHo
I am glad that it was pulled, but are they going to make it right with a retraction? I challenge KATU to make it fully correct!
Where’s an air horn when you need one?
For years the film prop hydropathy table sat in the office of the superintendent’s office (which more than one picked up for me demonstrating their superiority over patients, doctors, me, indian chiefs, gap-toothed secretaries, various Willamette valley rockstars, fast-trigger cops, ladies who lunch at the Town Club and all other bastards.) It seems to have disappeared during recent renovations, and is probably sitting in someone’s garage. Look for it a Salem-area estate sale in 20+ years.
Just FYI, it was the state NAMI organization – NAMI Oregon – that sent the action alert.
laugh all you want (and you should), but there are more than a few mentally disturbed people wandering the streets of P town