Espoo boys go home - to Greenville - for Christmas

BEHIND THE HEADLINES

print this

By Riikka Venäläinen
     
      Rogers boys to be returned to United States was the headline to the Finnish News Agency’s ticker story at 08:46 on the Tuesday before Christmas. The same information was relayed in the morning newscasts on radio and television.
      Early on the Tuesday morning, the Supreme Court had put a full-stop to the 18-month dispute between Finnish woman Outi Koski and her American ex-husband John Rogers over the custody of their two boys, aged 10 and 13.
      Well, if not a full stop, then at least the Supreme Court had called time-out in the case. The return to their father in the United States of the two boys, who had been kept in Finland by their mother since the summer of 2003, was to be carried out without delay under the terms of the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction ("The Hague Treaty", 1980).
      Father John Rogers promised boys a proper Christmas was the headline in the late-edition tabloid Ilta-Sanomat’s story the following day, by which time the boys were already in a plane bound for the U.S. via Paris. Father Rogers to take boys home today offered the rival tabloid Iltalehti on its front page.
     
We had indeed come a long way from the days last spring when the case of "the Rogers boys" first surfaced in the press.
      Espoo boys snatched on their way to school declared Ilta-Sanomat in its lead story on March 29th. Helsingin Sanomat continued the following day with Father suspected in attempt to kidnap Espoo boys.
      All other media sources described the brothers as "Espoo boys".
      The boys from Espoo returned to the columns of the newspapers after a brief pause, in late August: the Supreme Court resolved that Aleksi and Jaakko were to be returned to their American father.
      The coverage stirred supporters into action: the people gathered to demonstrate on behalf of the Koski boys, and petitions calling for the boys to be allowed to remain at home soon filled up with names.
     
At this point, nobody noticed or saw fit to notice that the "Espoo boys" of the story were born, brought up, educated at school, and had in fact lived almost their entire lives in North Carolina in the United States.
      A court in the family’s then home town of Greenville, N.C. had ruled on joint custody after the couple’s divorce, with the initial agreement being that the mother would be the guardian of first instance. Two years later, the parties agreed that the father would be the primary guardian. The boys did not live in Finland, or in Espoo, until the summer of 2003, when the mother - who had brought the children here for the holidays - broke the agreement to return them to their father after the summer vacation was over.
      In March of this year, the father tried to take the children - as described in the Finnish media as "the Espoo boys" - back to the United States. The three of them were apprehended in Paris and the boys were brought back to Finland.
     
"The entire affair is a textbook example of how a blinkered national viewpoint still holds sway in the mass media", says Professor Heikki Heikkilä of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at Tampere University.
      Heikkilä has used the Koski-Rogers dispute as an example in his media analysis lectures during the past autumn semester.
      He argues that the handling of the custody dispute in the press and elsewhere indicates how journalists jump relatively uncritically onto the side of their own nationality, regardless of the subject under discussion.
      "The ideal of not taking sides generally gets scrubbed immediately when it is a case of a dispute involving one party who is a Finn. Children who are abducted from Finland are always Finnish, but apparently so are children abducted to Finland", ponders Heikkilä.
     
In the reporting on the custody dispute between Outi Koski and John Rogers, "half of the boys’ nationality" was systematically excised from the beginning, according to Heikkilä. When the authorities are economical with their press releases and the father was not around to comment, the media leant more or less directly on the statements coming from the mother’s side.
      First the former couple’s common children were "Espoo boys", then "Finnish boys", or "the Koski boys". Within a month or two, the brothers were being called by their Finnish first names of Jaakko and Aleksi, although their official given names are Jacob and Alexander Rogers.
      Government urged to intercede in dispute over return of Espoo boys, read the headline in Helsingin Sanomat’s Home News section on September 12th. Even at the end of October, Alexander and Jacob Rogers were being generally referred to as Espoo boys.
     
Heikkilä is not singling out the Finns for their lack of national impartiality: he says it is typical of journalism the world over. One can best notice it when watching local news bulletins abroad. At home, the national perspective seems so natural, so much a part of the everyday, that it does not even get noticed - except perhaps on the sports pages, of course.
      Is it such a bad thing?
      "Well, if you consider that the world is becoming an increasingly international place, and that journalism should be going the same way, then yes, it is. Or at least it is if one thinks that the ideal of the spread of information is even-handedness. One could make a lateral comparison with some other aspect of our lives: how would it look if science, for example, was as narrowly chauvinistic?" asks Heikkilä.
     
In September, when the boys’ mother failed to get the Supreme Court to overturn its ruling on the return of Jacob and Alexander, she took the boys off into hiding, and it all went quiet on the media front.
      Surprisingly, the boys’ Finnishness then began to erode. Heikkilä’s interpretation of what happened is that the case had been chewed over for so long that the media felt it was time to take stock and look back over the previous months, to consider what had been done and said.
      Gradually the public got to read and hear about "Finnish-American" and even "American-Finnish" boys. The headlines got progressively longer as they had to include the names of both Koski and Rogers. The boys, too, morphed back to become Alexander and Jacob.
      There were the first neutral references to "the boys", and "the boys to be returned" or "the boys at the centre of the custody dispute".
     
"It has been interesting to witness how after the process of self-examination the viewpoints began to shift and the terminology changed almost imperceptibly, without any evident justification for the new approach. If a politician were to turn his coat in this fashion, there would be no shortage of people around to mutter about it", notes Heikkilä.
      When the Supreme Court’s final judgement brought everyone back into line on December 21st, the faint sense of collective shame at the bias was exorcised at a stroke. When the Court decided once and for all that the boys should go back to their father, the papers called things by their real names and spoke openly about "the Rogers boys".
      Can it be long before we read the first reports about the return home and the Christmas of "the Greenville boys"?
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 24.12.2004
     
     
Behind the Headlines is an occasional article series in which Helsingin Sanomat staffers comment on the media.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Father takes Jacob and Alexander Rogers back to USA (23.12.2004)
  Supreme Court rules for father in final decision in international custody case (21.12.2004)

RIIKKA VENÄLÄINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
riikka.venalainen@hs.fi