Is the Media largely to blame for mass shootings?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I think if I were a disaffected youth considering a shooting rampage, the first thing on my mind would be the media coverage. I’d make sure that my Facebook page looked a certain way so that only my nicest pictures were shown on TV. I’d probably do the Elliot Roger thing and post a manifesto. Or pull a Seung-Hui Cho and mail to Anderson Cooper a video so that it would arrive on the day of the shooting, just to make an already sensational story even more so. Why the hell not? I’m a dumb teenager. My immature brain can’t imagine death. OF COURSE, I will be there to watch Anderson Cooper dabbing at his pretty blue eyes.

I think we’d still have mass shootings even without 24-news coverage, but I think it’s kind of strange to assume it doesn’t have ANY affect. If news coverage of suicides can trigger suicides, it seems to me that mass shootings could be similarly contagious.

22

Offering only two choices kind of limits. I think the media certainly bears SOME blame for publicizing atrocities in ways that can glorify the murderers/terrorists, but it’s only a minor amount of blame, not greatly.

23

You could convince me it’s anything. The atomization of society. Post industrial ennui. Plastics.

How often did this happen hundreds of years ago? You know, grab the scythe from the tool shed and go to town on your one room schoolhouse and lop the head off that bitch of a teacher.

24

I think you are mis-using the statistics here by referencing only quality and ignoring quantity. Sure mass shootings pre-date the 24hour news cycle, and yes dumbasses still run out on the field. But from what I can see, the numbers of the former are way up, and the number of the latter are way down, in a way that correlates to (and may be caused by) media coverage.

Essentially, mass killings are a fad, and fads perpetuate through perpetrators seeing others doing something and copying them. So many mass killers seem to be lonely, attention starved people that I find it hard to believe the massive attention they gain by killing a bunch of people has nothing to do with it.

But having said that, as Mick Jagger says, “after all it was you and me”. The media provide the stories that you and me are proven to want to watch.

Though, to be fair to myself, I pretty much never watch or read stories about mass killings, personally.

25

It depends what you mean by “largely.” Is the media the foremost cause of the shooting sprees? No. Are they a cause? Yes, and IMO not too small.

Think of it this way: you’re a teenage boy who fits all the stereotypes of “shooters” - a loner, not given too much attention, looked over by their teachers, looked over by their parents. Throw in heaps of mental illness and you’ve got a recipe for suicide.

But wait: what if you could do something more than that? What if, instead of being just another teenage suicide statistic, you could be on the cover of Rolling Stone, be talked about by the President, be analyzed for hours, days on end by CNN? What if you get a lengthy Wikipedia page, be known, be noticed? Sure, it’s infamy, you’ll go down in history as monster, but the opposite of love isn’t hatred. It’s indifference. Better to be despised than to be no one.

I truly believe that a couple decades ago, most of the people on the list of school shooters would have simply killed themselves. Sure, there were mass shootings in the past, but nowhere near this frequency. In MPSIMS, people now give dates in the thread titles of school shootings to differentiate them from the dozens of other similar threads. Something’s broken.

I’m not suggesting all media coverage of shootings should stop. People need to know what’s going on in the world. But there should be a limit.

26

It was my understanding that the argument about the media being to blame isn’t because about a shooter trying to gain infamy. I thought the argument about media being to blame was for planting the seed in someone’s mind to begin with. A subtle but important difference (to me anyway).

27

I firmly believe the Media attention is a lure for people seeking attention. I want to be important. I want people to know my name. You’ll never ever forget me. All reasons to do something horrific and memorable.

The media makes every single one of them infamous.

Correct me if I’ve forgotten somebody. Wasn’t the very first mass public shooting committed by Charles Whitman (University of Texas)? The nutcase shooting from a tower in the middle of campus. Shot quite a few people in the early 1960’s. Got all kinds of press for weeks.

Every few years we get a new nut that wants to be infamous.

28

I think it’s entirely possible its both. If angry, lonely, attention-deprived assholes had heard less about previous instances of mass shootings would it diminish the chance they did the same? Yes I suspect so. If angry, lonely, attention-deprived assholes didn’t see the perpetrators of mass shootings get so much attention would it diminish the chance they did the same? Yes I suspect so.

29

I agree with those saying the people who pulled the trigger are to blame.

We need stricter people control laws.

30

Two former students were arrested after plotting a ‘Columbine-style’ massacre at a Massachusetts high school over Facebook.

Arguments as to whether they were seriously planning to shoot up a school aside, I think that posting ‘columbine ove again.’ indicates some interest in media coverage.

But the largest share of the blame falls squarely on the shooter(s).

31

Yeah, that’s where I come down.

For any one spree killing, you can blame the person pulling the trigger. But looking at all of them together, the largest portion of the blame has to fall on the enablers. One guy killed 20 kids and 6 teachers at an elementary school nearly 2 years ago, but the deaths just keep on coming because a politically powerful group of people insists that nothing be done to stanch the flow.

32

No, not the media, not the guns themselves, guns are inanimate objects, the entire blame should be on the shooter, nothing more.

33

It depends on what you mean by “blame”. If you mean causative, yes. If you mean culpable, no. I assumed the latter.

That is, I bet there would be fewer of them if Columbine and those that followed had been censored. Is that a sufficient reason to censor? No.

I remember as a kid wondering why stuff like that didn’t happen a lot more often, given that there were 250 million people in the US. I figured that at least 1 in a million would go off the deep end every year. Thank goodness I was wrong, especially now that there are 300M of us.

34

I believe that ammonium nitrate is fairly carefully controlled, more so than guns. This despite its very common use as a fertilizer.

That’d require amending the US constitution. Not likely.

35

This dosen’t mean anything substantial. Fame is a myth for a dead guy. He really dosen’t benefit from it. Glory? Nah.
The media reports the hell out of mass shootings, and people on their couches overreact.

36

Firstly the shooter doesn’t always die. Secondly, you are thinking like a sane person. IIRC there’s pretty good evidence in the form of notes etc that posthumous infamy and (perverse) glory does motivate mass shooters.

37

I blame my ex girlfriend.

She wars a total bitch.

38

lots of people believe in myths. All you’re doing is assuming everyone else sees things exactly as you do.

39

We had media in 1949.

[QUOTE=Lumpy]
As mentioned upthread, mass killings predate our media culture. This shotgun massacre took place in 1915, with 8 dead and 32 wounded.
[/QUOTE]
And we had media in 1915.

I voted no on the poll question. Nonetheless, the idea that media sensationalization of stories about death, violence, or crime began with 24-hour cable news is looking at the past with rose-colored lenses. Even back when the only mass-media was newspapers, there was intense competition for readership (including trying to get people to buy an evening paper despite having paid for and read a morning paper) and “if it bleeds, it leads” was just as much a newspaper editor’s mantra as it was in television news decades later. Yellow journalism? Chicago, the musical?

40

What? You don’t think that anyone is motivated by their final acts by the idea that it will bring them glory or infamy or otherwise influence the way they’re thought of after they die?

As far as “blame” goes, that’s a tricky subject full of semantics, so I’ll say it like this:

If the media did not go into a frenzy over mass shootings, shift their coverage predominantly to that incident, have experts on speculating on the psychology of the perpetrator, give attention to their grievances or manifesto, and basically make them the most famous person in the country for a couple of weeks, would there be fewer mass shootings? Yes, significantly.

Did anyone see how the Canadian news handled the parliament shooting? They took the high road, said they’re going to focus on what happened and on the victims, and not give the perpetrator of his beliefs air time, not even to mention his name. It was such a ridiculous contrast to the absurd circus that the American media runs whenever there’s an event like that here that I don’t even think they’re in the same business. American journalistic ethics are in the toilet.

People who snap and do this sort of thing often think the world is ignoring them, or unfairly victimizing them, and that they’re going to get their revenge. The world is finally going to see how wrong it was for neglecting/ostracizing/whatever them. They absolutely crave that level of attention. If the person looks on the media frenzy around past events, and thinks to himself “yeah, that’s the blaze of glory I’m going out on”, he’s much more likely to actually commit it than if the incidents were reported responsibly, without a focus on the perpetrator, and with far less glory and infamy.

Changing the way the media treats these incidents would actually be the most cost effective way, by orders of magnitude, of preventing these sorts of things. Merely a few organizations would have to agree to not give the criminals the infamy and attention they crave, and you’d see a significant reduction in these events.

If you believe the media only gives the public what it wants, then you can do your part by not getting off on macabre coverage of these incidents. Shit happens, put it in perspective, and don’t gobble up that news coverage obsessively to try to see people speculate and pick apart every last aspect of these incidents. The attention you give to these people is, in most cases, exactly the sort of thing that drives them to do it in the first place.