Are The Media Complicit In Mass Shootings?

Among the most chilling details to emerge in the Orlando massacre is that the killer paused during his three-hour rampage at the Pulse nightclub to search Facebook for news about it.

“Pulse Orlando” and “shooting,” Omar Mateen typed into his smartphone, investigators found.

The LA Times reports his real-time search is a striking data point in what has become a pattern in mass shootings: Killers deeply attuned to their media coverage and in some cases engineering it.

Media outlets have long taken the position that they simply report the news. But experts who study mass violence say they are also part of the story, because the intense coverage that such tragedies receive can inspire new shooters.

The perpetrators of these attacks are often disillusioned young men, and they inhabit the same publicity-obsessed culture as everybody else. Killing offers the prospect of becoming a household name.

Sherry Towers, a researcher at Arizona State University, has conducted one of the few studies looking at connections between shootings.

The study found that shootings that occurred in schools or ones in which at least four people died — the sorts of incidents that receive widespread media coverage — occurred in clusters. That suggested to researchers the kind of copycat effect that has been well documented for suicides.

Florida Nightclub Shooting | Graphiq

After the shootings, the risk of more shootings rose significantly and remained elevated for an average of 13 days, according to the analysis published last year in the journal PLOS One. However, the research found no increased risk after shootings in which at least three people were hit but not necessarily killed, incidents that are so common they usually receive only local news coverage.

Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston who has tracked mass killings, said that beginning with Columbine there was a rash of school shootings that generated widespread media coverage.

“All these killers want the publicity,” he said. “They want to go down in infamy. Achieving the highest body count is one way to do that.”

“The media have not only a right but a responsibility to report the news,” Levin said. “The problem is the way the news gets reported. The emphasis is usually not on the victims but on the killer. … We make celebrities out of monsters.”