Mass Shootings and the Media
Escalation of Fear, Escalation of Violence
America is stuck in a cycle of gun violence and has been for decades. However, there is a particular brand of violence that we are all too familiar with: the lone gunman armed to the teeth against unarmed people in a confined space who are nigh helpless to stop him. This particular brand of violence has escalated with the time intervals between such events depreciating from years to months to even weeks.
The question we should be asking is why the escalation? Why is it that these tragedies are happening with more frequency than ever before? Is it the lack of gun control laws? It may surprise some people, but a significant contributor to this situation is the news, our own media.
When gun violence events happen what we often see is the wide emblazoned text on tabloids on media platforms. Whether it be newspapers, blogs, or television channels, these events get a large range of coverage. That is where the trouble begins.
The Motivation
The lone gunman is often a psychologically unhinged person who has no value for the sanctity of human life. Whether they are abusive or come from an abusive background, have extremist views, or are simply racist, they share one agenda: to get their point across. Each lone gunman all seek to make their mark on society, and they don’t care how they do it.
These people, ineffectual at life with nothing to lose but everything to prove, have an effective forum to express their murderous actions: the mainstream media. News outlets like blogs, radio, and television networks enable the lone gunman to have the recognition that he so desperately desires.
The lone gunman seeks notoriety and news platforms give it to them. Like flies hovering over a carcass, news platforms drawing out the coverage of mass shootings provide these shooters part of the incentive for violence against others.
Sick Twist of Irony
Journalism is a business and CNN, Fox News, and newspapers across the country sell stories, coverage, gossip and etc. To stay afloat, they need companies to buy ad space on their sites. Advertisements are the bread and butter of journalistic media. All of them need views and clicks and subscriptions are crucial to attract advertisers.
If your network has a lot of views you can attract a lot of money and investment because companies can advertise their services on a popular platform. For news networks, ratings are king; they are a source of revenue, and there is no greater ratings booster than when a mass shooting occurs. In an insidious twist of irony, news and other journalistic companies benefit greatly from the mass shooting itself.
The more valuable the ad space, the more money can be made. This point becomes an issue in the problem of the portrayal of gun violence in the mass media. The news validates the lone gunman’s self of sense by presenting his grisly handiwork in tabloids across the world. He is now famous for being infamous. They don’t care if they are hated, the lone gunman just wants recognition, and the cable news fuels that in the way they cover the event.
The Dying Become Dangerous
The fact that the internet killed many journalistic platforms is why cable news has come to this dangerous point. As more people get their news from the web, other news platforms like newspapers and radio channels were unable to adapt and lost their subscribers; the loss of subscribers led to a loss of income. Cable news is surviving in the internet age, and it is doing so by changing the very nature of its journalism…by making the news more interesting and fun to watch.
This is dangerous for journalism because the truth becomes skewed by showmanship. When mass shootings occur, the travesty of the lives lost, the issues about gun control, and social outcry are milked for all they are worth by these companies desperate (like the lone gunman) for attention. Both the news media and lone shooters feed off of notoriety. It is a sad state of affairs that uses human death as a means of self-promotion and social and financial edification.
