Virginia Journalist Shooting: The Media needs to clean the blood off its own hands

Before the bodies were buried, the old media and other proponents of ever more restrictions on the Second Amendment were using the deaths to promote their political agenda.  They piously fail to mention their own responsibility.

The “Copycat Effect” is a well known and researched phenomena.  Endless promotion of these tragic events and the publicity given to the perpetrators is far more of a causal factor than the Second Amendment.

We have known for decades that it is media attention that is the driving motivation for most of these public mass shooters.

The copycat effect has been demonstrated and documented over and over again.  Clayton Cramer wrote a paper on this in 1993.   It was published in a the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 9:1 [Winter 1993-94].  It won First Place, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Ethics Prize, 1993, Undergraduate Division.

It has been widely written about in other publications, such as the Wall Street Journal.   A book, The Copycat Effect, by Loren Coleman, was written in 2004. 

It detailed simple strategies for mitigating the effect and reducing the number of these mass public killings.   They could be implemented without any significant chilling effect on the first amendment.    The AP could simply include these requirements in its writers guidelines.  

The Cramer article has been around for 20 years, and won a prize for ethics.  The book by Coleman has been available for over a decade.  Any thoughtful person can see the obvious connection between making anti-heros of public shooters and the potential to tip unbalanced people over the edge, into an act that they see as immortalizing their otherwise miserable lives.

It is clear that the media would rather keep their power to use these events push for more restrictive gun laws than prevent innocents from being murdered.  As Cramer noted, the coverage of school shooting is at least 8 times as large at that of similar mass homicides that do not involve guns.

In a strange twist, the old media actually benefit financially from these shootings:  Newtown Media Buys.

When media personalities try to pressure candidates to push for more restrictive laws, as happened recently with Dr. Carson, candidates should push back by asking why the media continues to promote public shootings for their own benefit. 

©2015 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.

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