Mass Killing and the Mass Media
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We know that news coverage of mass killings can actually serve as inspiration for more mass killings — especially when it comes to school shootings. It’s something Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in The Tipping Point, regarding how social phenomena spread like diseases.
And, yet… the news media can’t help them(our?)selves.
This edition of the BBC program Newswipe (fans of dry British humor should press play above), highlighted by Mind Hacks, looks at television coverage of a recent school shooting in Germany and finds that — surprise — the media is doing exactly the opposite of what experts recommend: making the killer an antihero, making the body count the headline, showing the killer’s face over and over, etc. The case was, of course, the same with the Virginia Tech shooting recently in the U.S.
In the Virginia Tech case, there weren’t any copycat shooters that I recall, but there were a number of copycat threats.
It’s human nature to be interested in these stories. And, thus, they’ll always mean ratings. But excessive coverage, like that which followed Columbine, undoubtedly has led to additional lives being lost over the years. So the media might take its responsibility a little more seriously.
UPDATE (4/3/09, 2:07 p.m.): Tragically, there’s a new mass killing today in New York. Brief thoughts here.
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[...] Our Ryan Sager has noted that there is a copy cat mentality in cases of violent crime covered by the mass media – if someone sees a person getting to make their case to the world posthumously after they shoot up their workplace, they might do the same. It stands to reason that if Joe Stack got to make his case to the world through a terrorist attack on the IRS facility in Austin, Texas, someone might try to do this same thing to this facility in Utah. [...]