Is the Media largely to blame for mass shootings?

[bump]

Senor Beef nailed it; the absurd media coverage lends a certain cachet to the idea that if you perpetrate one of these atrocities, you’ll definitely get your 15 minutes of fame, and then some.

I mean, if you look at the lists, the vast majority took place after the introduction of the 24 hour news cycle, and of those, they seem weighted to the post-internet time frame.

You can’t tell me that the Bath School Bombings were more than a small article in the say… Atlanta, Dallas or Kansas City papers, or more than a brief mention on the radio when they happened.

But nowadays, it would be all we heard about for days, and the stories about the killer and glurge about the victims and their families would haunt us for years.

So clearly the phenomenon isn’t caused by news coverage, but news coverage certainly makes it more infamous or “popular” or whatever, and that’s usually what these types are looking for.

Not incidentally, that’s the raison d’etre of terrorism as well.

[Velocity]

@SenorBeef

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.

Yes.

And yes.

And yes.

And yes. And yes.

[TriPolar]

SenorBeef is dead on. I don’t know how to evaluate ‘largely’ as used in the OP, but clearly the media coverage makes a difference. Look at the Ebola epidemic that has killed zeroes of Americans so far. There can be no doubt that the media can drive what people think about. Remember the Maine?