People often complain that the media gives a great deal of attention and notoriety to mass murderers (such as a gunman going on a killing spree or a pilot crashing an airplane on purpose,) thus giving incentive for potential mass murderers to seek fame likewise, but practically speaking, what form of coverage *would *be ideal?
If the media were to insist on remaining tight-lipped and not providing information about the killer, that would simply spark even more interest in the killer’s identity, background, etc. Society simply is curious about such things.
Would this be an ideal way to cover such events?
“A pilot is believed to have crashed a Germanwings airplane intentionally, killing over a hundred people. In accordance with our media policy, the pilot’s identity, nationality, religion, name, background, motives, and other such information will not be released.”*
Murders are local matters. I need to know if a maniac is running around my town with a shotgun. I would like to know which of my neighbors won’t be showing up at the grocery store anymore. People on the coasts don’t.
A mass killing like the Virginia Tech shooting or Norway attacks transcends local interest. And as for your neighbor, there’s no media reason not to cover victims and their life stories.
There is an issue of scale to consider. Some kid gunning down a half dozen of his classmates is a different kind of story than 20 guys smashing planes into packed office buildings and killing thousands.
I won’t pretend to know where a line should be drawn, but I would like to thank that editorial boards would be aware that there should be a line, maybe blurry at times, but somewhere.
Did I ask “Why?” about the 911 attacks? No.
The 911 attacks made the local news because it was a time of uncertainty. Local airports were effected, security was tightened, and no one knew if there were targets in other parts of the country.
On the other hand, unless there is news that the mass killer at Virginia Tech had plans to travel to my hometown to continue the killing spree there, I would rather local news wasn’t pushed to the side to cover the incident.
I don’t need to know my neighbor’s life story, though an explanation of why he’s not going to be mowing his lawn anymore might be useful.
It might be a subject for this thread, but as far as editorial choices go, if today’s news choice is coverage of Kanye West interrupting some music awards program, or how many bullets were fired in the last school massacre, give me the bullet count.
Publicizing killers who kill for publicity turns the media into accessories after the fact.
If the Colombine shooters were only referred to in the media as “moron number one and moron number two”, my guess is that we’d never see triple digits.
The question, then, is how many people kill for publicity as opposed to killing for other reasons? And how would news organizations, presented with a killing, decide whether the killing is for publicity or for other reasons?
Why blame the media? I blame the millions upon millions of rubes who consume the media. If there’s a market, you’d better believe somebody’s going to fill it.
The real answer here is not for the media to stop covering things, but for people to stop watching as much “news.”
What local news? Man bites dog? This idea of ignoring significant stories, especially because we’re worried about copy cats is akin to hiding under the bed.
They’re not that significant. More people die every day from cancer than died in the 9/11 attacks. If nobody cares about the thousands who die every day of cancer and car wrecks, why should 20 people getting shot take over the media for a whole week?
There was a time when papers in the Soviet Union reported local items such as how many shoes were made in the local factories that week, what the attendance rate at Great Soviet Businesses 1 and 2 were, and what goals were necessary to emphasize in the coming weeks.
All local items–the news you *really *need to know–was how it was explained to me. And it was contrasted with Americans reading about a murder in another country, an environmental case on another continent, what star will host Saturday Night Live.
I can see what they were saying, but nobody can say it wasn’t dry.
I don’t think it’s particularly monstrous for people to speculate on why someone did something unthinkably against human nature. I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with the media meeting that demand.
The only thing most of us care about with regards to the germanwings flight is answering the question “why?” Nobody really cares about the people who died, except their loved ones. Why should we? The deaths don’t bother us, because death is something everyone understands. We even kind of understand “normal” murders, because all you have to do is imagine having emotions all of us have actually had, but “stronger.” We know why a guy kills his wife, or his boss, or a dude that cut him off in traffic. That’s just greed, jealousy, anger, whatever. What we can’t understand is someone who kills children, or someone who keeps body parts in the freezer, or someone who convinces a whole group of people to commit suicide, or someone who stalks and kills complete strangers, or who kills 150 people during his own suicide. Normal people don’t ever experience “mild” versions of whatever emotion makes people do the REALLY sick shit. We want someone to tell us why, because it’s just unacceptable that the answer is “nobody really knows.” It’s our nature to demand a satisfying explanation, and I can’t imagine the media responding any way other than they currently do.
Nobody is going to kill children at a school because they saw someone else do it on tv and they want the attention. Anyone capable of doing something horrible like that already had whatever emotional glitch it takes, and the media digging for the answer to the question “why?” isn’t making it more likely to happen.
A city council vote on whether free parking downtown will be eliminated on weekends is more important locally than the lurid tale of a mass murder 3/4 of a continent away, and yet the latter will be the top story on the local news, and the former might not get mentioned at all.
Because it’s something that doesn’t happen every day?
Would you rather the news headlines be the same every day: “Thousands in West die of heart disease and cancer, thousands in developing world die of malnutrition related diseases”. Who would buy or subscribe to such a news service?
We get the objection all the time on the Dope of “Why are we reporting on Syria / a plane crash / the norwegian killer when X people died today due to Y?”. The answer is of course that the news is weighted by various factors, with the headcount of deaths being just one of those factors. Other factors include how novel the event is, what significance it might have going forwards, whether it might require some change to the viewers’ behaviour (e.g. new security procedures for flying doesn’t involve any deaths, but would be of interest to many people) and how close to the viewer the event is.
