I have often heard that most people who commit these atrocities do so because they want to be famous, or have some kind of “message”. So why do we give them exactly what they want by having the media talk non-stop about the attacks that happen?
Let me give you an anecdote. In 1993 the Mississippi River flooded for six straight weeks. In St. Louis (and I’m sure, many other places) the local media pretty much went with wall-to-wall disaster coverage. For at least those six weeks, there was no coverage of car crashes, cute puppies, and especially no coverage of crime, drugs, gangs, murder, etc. The reporters were too busy talking about entire towns being under water.
According to the highest-rated anchor in town, there was no change in the actual number of car crashes, cute puppies – and especially no change in the actions of gangs, sales of drugs or murders. We didn’t see or hear anything about it, but it still went on.
Michael Brown was killed five weeks ago in Ferguson, Mo. You aren’t hearing about demonstrations on the nightly news anymore, but they’re still going on. The media isn’t flocking to Chicago to cover the murders anymore, but they’re still going on.
Maybe six weeks isn’t long enough to draw a conclusion. But I think maybe it is.
How are you going to prevent it, short of censorship? If we, the viewing public, don’t want to see such coverage, and change the channel when it comes on, then the media will stop providing it.
Since we (collectively, on average) do watch it, the media considers itself rewarded for showing it.
Back during the O.J. Simpson trial, one network decided to stop showing gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial. Their ratings plummeted. It’s our fault. We like this stuff.
As I recall, there’s been some success in getting news outlets not to cover teen suicides, after the link was demonstrated that devoting a lot of coverage to teen suicide actually encouraged more suicides. I’ve heard some people argue that the same thing might be in play with spree killers.
I’m not sure how you’d get that to work with terrorism, though. I mean, how the hell do you not cover 9/11? People are going to notice those buildings are missing sooner or later!
I think there is a fine line between media coverage and media frenzy. I think that news programming should cover newsworthy events. That’s their job. Where it steps over the line is when the media covers the incident from every known angle and a few angles they make up for ratings. Watch the news and with every big event, they, eventually, start groping at ideas and conjectures, just so they can continue the coverage. Also, when they start bringing in “experts”, to correlate the event to some inkling of an apocalypse or something similar for weeks on end. That’s when it’s no longer covering news, but creating a mass hysteria. Unfortunately, mass hysteria = ratings, which is all TV stations care about, for the most part.