The Media has Blood on its Hands in Florida Mass Murder

Another mass killing has taken place in the defenseless victim zone of a Florida high school in the Miami metropolitan area of Broward County.

The major media in this country has blood on its hands. They know that mass killers are incentivised by media coverage that gives a form of immortallity to the deranged killers. The pattern is clear.  Many of the killers are open about their desire for infamy. The Port Arther murderer asked his lawyer, again and again: “Did I break the record?”.

The media does not care how many innocents die because of their push for ratings and to further their agenda to disarm the population. 

Once again, a disturbed teenager has become a copy-cat killer, following the narrative and fame the media has been pushing for a couple of decades.

These mass shootings come in clusters, as the killers are incentivized by the promise of fame the media provides, in their rush to push for restrictions on firearm ownership.

There are numerous ways the media can cover school shootings while providing little incentive for more school shooters. The media has been told, again and again, how it could be done.  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.

These mass killings receive far more media attention than comparable mass killings involving other instruments, such as arson, automobiles, knives, or other items. The mass murderss would be substantially reduced if the media followed a few  guidelines recommended by Loren Coleman in his book, The Copycat Effect, in 2004.  The book details strategies for reducing incentives for mass killings. 

(1) The media must be more aware of the power of their words. Using language like “successful” sniper attacks, suicides, and bridge jumpers, and “failed” murder-suicides, for example, clearly suggest to viewers and readers that someone should keep trying again until they “succeed.” We may wish to “succeed” in relationships, sports, and jobs, but we do not want rampage or serial killers, architects of murder-suicide, and suicide bombers to make further attempts after “failing.” Words are important. Even the use of “suicide” or “rampage” in headlines, news alerts, and breaking bulletins should be reconsidered.

(2) The media must drop their clichéd stories about the “nice boy next door” or the “lone nut.” The copycat violent individual is neither mysterious nor healthy, or usually an overachiever. They are often a fatal combination of despondency, depression, and mental illness. School shooters are suicidal youth that slipped through the cracks, but it is a complex issue, nevertheless. People are not simple. The formulaic stories are too often too simplistic.

(3) The media must cease its graphic and sensationalized wall-to-wall commentary and coverage of violent acts and the details of the actual methods and places where they occur. Photographs of murder victims, tapes of people jumping off bridges, and live shots of things like car chases ending in deadly crashes, for example, merely glamorize these deaths, and create models for others ­ down to the method, the place, the timing, and the type of individual involved. Even fictional entertainment, such as the screening of The Deer Hunter, provides vivid copycatting stimuli for vulnerable, unstable, angry, and depressed individuals. 

(4) The media should show more details about the grief of the survivors and victims (without glorifying the death), highlight the alternatives to the violent acts, and mention the relevant background traits that may have brought this event to this deathly end. They should also avoid setting up the incident as a logical or reasonable way to solve a problem.

(5) The media must avoid ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural stereotypes in portraying the victims or the perpetrators. Why set up situations that like-minded individuals (e.g. neo-Nazis) can use as a roadmap for a future rampages against similar victims?

(6) The media should never publish a report on suicide or murder-suicide without adding the protective factors, such as the contact information for hot lines, help lines, soft lines, and other available community resources, including email addresses, websites, and phone numbers. To run a story on suicide or a gangland murder without thinking about the damage the story can do is simply not responsible. It¹s like giving a child a loaded gun. The media should try to balance such stories with some concern and consideration for those who may use it to imitate the act described.

(7) And finally, the media should reflect more on their role in creating our increasingly violent society. Honest reporting on the positive nature of being alive in the twenty-first century might actually decrease the negative outcomes of the copycat effect, and create a wave of self-awareness that this life is rather good after all. Most of our lives are mundane, safe, and uneventful. This is something that an alien watching television news from outer space, as they say, would never know. The media should “get real,” and try to use their influence and the copycat effect to spread a little peace, rather than mayhem.

In Australia, once the media there achieved extreme gun controls, it stopped the incentives for mass murder by shooting. Mass murder by shooting, always extremely rare in in Australia, was reduced.

David Kopel, published in the Wall Street Journal, wrote about the copycat effect and Coleman’s book in December of 2012. 

The media cynically benefits from coverage of these events.  The media benefit from ratings and from politicization of the event.  They use these events to further their agenda to impose more restrictions on gun ownership and use.  The restrictions desired seldom have a relationship to the mass killings.

Semi-automatic rifles existed in the United States for over a hundred years. Mass murder with them increased in the last 20, as the Media has pushed the narrative.

How much more blood will be on media hands before they stop using these events to promote their political agenda?  How many more innocents will be considered to be “collateral damage” in their push for citizen disarmament?

©2018 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

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