Regarding the story "Suicide watch policy changed" by Jennifer Reeger in the Tribune-Review on July 8, 2003.  I wish to thank you for ignoring the cause of Mr. Robert R Steadman's suicide which is sure to please the "politically correct" and the entrenched political infrastructure.  An infrastructure that gains funding on the backs of dead fathers and their suicidal children. There is no reason the Tribune-Review should not climb onboard.  There is plenty of room on the backs of the 24,000 males that commit suicide each year.  It was a fine example of the current, conglomerate, buttered-up, "spin" reporting and should ensure a couple votes in congress to oppose the roll-back of the FCC's ruling to allow a 45% takeover of all the media in an area. 

 

Robert's children, provided they do not follow in the footsteps of their father like many fatherless children, will be enthralled to know that their father died to help promote a suicide policy change in Westmorland Prison.  Sure, if the media was doing their job, the Steadman children could at least say their father died because of unConstitutional abuses against him and his children.   His death could have brought awareness of those abuses for future families sake. 

 

Media ignores the initial cause of these suicides.  Predominately, in a divorce, over 80% of the time initiated by the wife, family courts place a child in one parent's physical custudy, over 80% of the time the mother, and makes the other parent the financially responsible parent, over 80% of the time the father.  Forget the fact that a child has Constitutional rights to both parent's equal guidance, support and custody.  Ignore the facts that children develop more functionally intact when both parent's roles are maintained.  Discount the fact that the financially reponsible parents are not allowed to get sick, laid off in a slow economy, incarcerated, take a job that decreases salary which includes demanded military service, become partially or totally disabled.  Any of these conditions makes the parent "underemployed".  Only paying 100% of the judicially decreed child support allows the financially responsible parent to remain free and allowed to drive.  Even paying 99.9% makes the parent a deadbeat, or in Robert's case just plain old dead. 

 

While the Tribune-Review did  write one sentence regarding the death of a father pushed to suicide, the rest of Pittsburgh's and the nation's media  ignored a story that is rampant in the U.S. and the western civilized world.  The facts are in desperate need of being brought to the public's and government's attention.

 

A celebration of the principles of journalism and the public trust is in order.  If the celebration was held each time a male was driven to suicide in the U.S., there could be one every 22 minutes.