12.15.2012

Overdone News Coverage of School Shootings

It's obvious that since Columbine, the news coverage of mass shootings has always been overdone and the number of shootings has risen steadily. Guns haven't gotten worse since then so why is this happening more often? The only thing that has gotten worse is the news coverage. News reporting of mass shootings has become progressively more detailed and more probing which is good for the news, but not for society. We have this idea that the more news time a story gets the more important it is. I don't need five months of coverage about the Connecticut elementary school shooting to tell me that it was a horrific event. But because the news shows a single person being killed one night as its feature story they think it's disrespectful to give any less attention to a mass shooting tragedy. Just report on this shit and let people know about it, but don't dissect and examine it under a microscope. The genocides that occur overseas are immense human tragedy involving loads of murdered children, but the news doesn't feel the need to dig into every killers' past there. Why here?

After every mass shooting literally nothing is done or can be done to prevent another, so all we can do is wait for the next one to happen like an earthquake. Reporting human tragedy is the job of the news, but interviewing children and digging into the killer's past to figure out why he did it is too much. Even if their intent is not to deify the shooter, the attention paid automatically makes him a subconscious icon to potential copycat lunatics. I really don't give a fuck where the killer came from, who his parents were, or what his motive was. Haven't we figured out that some people are just insane and frustrated with their lives so they think the best idea is to kill a lot of people and then themselves? Because if we haven't then it's about time that sinks in. The news always talks about "senseless" school shootings like there's such thing as a sensible one. There isn't. The news media needs to stop trying to find the sense in lunacy and stop validating these events and making them attractive playbooks to future killers.

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