PressEthic

A high school student in Sacramento, California, was tracked down by federal agents after posting an anti-Bush image on her myspace page, CNN reported this morning.

14-year old Julia Wilson’s page featured a photo of the President with a crudely drawn knife stabbing his hand, a slanted red line (the universal sign for ‘anti’) running across his face and a “kill Bush”-caption on top of the page.

“I understand that I went too far but teenage emotions are at a peak, and one day I decided to make a myspace page that just went over the line,” Julia said in an interview with CNN.

Julia and her parents were taken by surprise when federal agents first showed up at the family’s door and later pulled Julia out of class to question her.

“They said: “This is a serious matter, I don’t think you understand that this is a federal offense.” They just started yelling at me and I just broke down crying,” she said.

Secret Service told CNN that they are required to take every threat seriously. “We don’t have a liberty to do otherwise,” their statement read.

CNN’s report also featured commentary from Julia’s mother and father, who recounted their surprise upon seeing agents at their door and criticized the way the situation was handled. Julia’s father said that pulling her daughter out of class and thus humiliating her was unnecessary.

The report itself showed an obvious slant for Julia Wilson; it included footage of her horseback riding, sitting in her pastel-colored room and eating dinner. Beyond showing a short quote on screen, CNN failed to include commentary from Secret Service itself. The bias is not surprising, however; after all, it is hard to criticize media bias when it seems to happen for a just cause. Many would agree that interrogating 14-year olds is a nearly absurd example of the government’s falsely targeting their sense of paranoia. Furthermore, the event demonstrates a national tendency to test the limits of laws and policies by exercising little common sense in the way in which they are followed.