It’s not about an interested person being aware of another person or event. It’s about being infamous, a grotesque celebrity known and reviled by millions.
None of these are affected by withholding names from the general public. Anyone with a personal tie to the killer will have no question as to his identity.
I’ll ask again: Should NBC broadcast instructions on how to build a bomb? I could come up with a bunch of reasons for it that are at least as legitimate as those you gave above.
The symptoms of psychopathy is irrelevant here. We’re talking about triggers and motivators associated with the behavior.
The cites absolutely make the case for fame-seeking killers. Harris and Klebold wrote at length about how they wanted to make a lasting impression, about how the world would know their names and see them as god-like. They were motivated by revenge for sure, but they didn’t just kill the kids who taunted them. They planned for weeks an event that would get as much attention outside their school and town as possible.
The reason they become infamous is because people are fascinating, grotesque as that may be, by stuff like this.
And the shooting will be front page, top story news on every channel and anyone interested around the world will Google the name. So there will be plenty of attention to crime and the killer. But for some reason if the name is not in print or on TV, that’ll deter these attacks. This is really a nonsense argument.
I very much doubt that.
We’re talking about things you think are triggers and motivators. Where did you get your psychology degree again?
Doesn’t change the fact that massive news coverage will be the primary vehicle to achieve that fame.
Knowing you’ll be Googled is a far cry from knowing every news anchor and talk show host in the country will be saying your name for months at least, that they’ll be showing your picture while the President speaks at your crime scene.
Watch me:
-Parents might be tipped off if they recognize those parts in their kid’s rooms. Same for neighbors on the look-out for potential terrorists.
-Law enforcement could be assisted if more people could spot a bomb.
-Would raise awareness about how easy it is for average people to build a bomb, enabling us to better protect ourselves.
And, of course, your favorite:
-I have a right to know. Plus, it’s on the Internet anyway.
I don’t need a psychology degree to read the evaluations from those who do… or the killers own words.
My point as well would be that resposible new sites, the largest of which are subsidiaries of the mainstream print and broadcast media, would follow suit. Plus, the number of people motivated enough to search it would be quite a bit smaller than those having it drilled in by relentless new coverage. The fame achieved from inclusion on blogs and lesser-trafficked news sites wouldn’t be even close to what it is today.
It dosen’t matter. Fame dosen’t change what happened, which is what matters. Whether famous or not, the victims’ status is unchanged. The victims are what matters. Just like when the media refer to tyrannical dictators and such by their first name… so what? Weird, yes, but insubstantial considering the human cost, which is all that matters. I don’t care if the movie theater shooter “gets famous”.
What should concern you is the possibility that there’s some borderline psychopath out there seeing how famous Holmes is becoming and thinking “that could be me.” Or even worse, “I can do better than that.” That’s the point of this debate.
During the O.J. Simpson trial, one network (if memory serves) tried not broadcasting daily gavel-to-gavel coverage. They were trying, perhaps heroically, to wean Americans from this absurd diet of pseudo-dramatic pablum.
The result? Their ratings plunged. Americans just changed to channels that did give the coverage.
It’s our fault. We like this crap.
The only way it could work would be by legislative coercion.
I don’t know why you are so fixated on the name specifically. Even if the name is redacted from coverage, the shooting will be national news, the president will speak at the crime scene, and so on and so on. And the name will be all over the web regardless. I would think that would still give the lunatic the satisfaction of knowing he’d made a splash. You have no basis for concluding that this tweak would prevent even one shooting spree. There’s no basis to even suggest it. You are making some very big assumptions about the motives and logic of people who are violently insane.
People don’t need to know the ingredients of a bomb for this.
Law enforcement can already do its own job and dealing with tons of false bomb reports will not help them.
This makes no sense at all and is counterproductive.
I don’t think you do have a right to have the TV news broadcast bomb-making instructions, actually. I’d love to hear your explanation for how that falls into your right to know. I think it’s pretty easy to make the case that the public needs to be informed about crimes and criminal trial proceedings since that’s fundamental to our justice system. We have a strong presumption against things like secret trials, and unfortunately, John Mace is correct that you’re arguing for something that points in that direction. My argument isn’t so much that we need to know the names of people who do crazy things like this, it’s that this should be the public’s decision to make and not the decision of the press (particularly since I find your reasoning to have very little credibility) and that our commitment to an open society and the interests of 300 million people getting their news is more important than your fear that a couple of maniacs will want to get on the news by killing people.
I don’t get this. You don’t think there should be any sort of legislative change, you just want people to up and start behaving the way you think they should behave, all on their own. If we’re going to sit around wishing that people would just voluntarily act better, why not wish that people wouldn’t go around shooting each other?
Anyway, the whole idea seems pointless, unless you’re going to cover up the fact that a crime happened at all. I don’t remember, off the top of my head, the name of the guy at Virgina Tech, or the two losers at Columbine, or the farmer in the '20s who loaded his truck with dynamite and scrap metal and blew up a school. They’re fresh in my head now, because I’ve just read their names in this thread, but if you’d asked me yesterday, I *might *have been able to come up with the name of one of the Columbine shooters. I don’t think I’m entirely atypical in that regard. They’re still famous, though, through their actions, if not their names. Columbine is synonymous with violent mass murder because of Klebold and Harris. For people with that sort of mentality, that’s likely fame enough. I don’t think the fact that people around the country are talking about “the Batman Shooter” is a sufficiently lesser plateau of fame to dissuade someone like Holmes from being a killer. There’s certainly a rich enough history of criminals becoming famous while deliberately obscuring their identities: Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer, &c. Anonymity is not a proven dissuasion for attention-seeking psychopaths.
What’s so strange about that? Plenty of industries have codes of practice or codes of ethics that are effectively binding without being based in legislation.
In fact, just such a code of practice for the reporting of mass-murders has been suggested by Dr Park Dietz:
Now, I don’t see any reason why the media couldn’t choose to report in such a way. The news (that a lot of people have been killed by a nutter) still gets out. There’s no question of stealth-totalitarianism preventing people from knowing what’s happening in the world. It’s simply a question of choosing to present the information in a way that minimises the likelihood of the event being a catalyst for other dangerously mentally ill people.
