Press coverage of shootings important, helps keep the general public informed
A police officer basks in the glory of the media.
November 13, 2015
Almost every week, on any given news media outlet, you hear about a student murdering one or more of their classmates.
There seems to be no solution to this massive problem that plagues us, but there has been some talk about how an overabundance of media coverage creates “copycat” killings.
I personally do not believe this is the problem at hand. There are too many other factors that come into play, not including the fact that a lot of these school killings are triggered by some form of bullying or depression.
If they see someone else on the news doing it, I don’t think that any sane person would want to imitate the violence.
When media outlets emphasize the killer, it disregards the feeling of the families of the victims. Some people refuse to say the name of shooters, like sheriff John Hanlin during his news conference discussing the Oregon shooting at Umpqua Community College.
Not naming the shooter doesn’t necessarily help the situation, and even if it did, there’s no background data to prove that it is an effective method in deterring shooters from their 15 minutes of fame.
Understanding why these things happen are completely separate from publicizing the killer.
If information is being suppressed, it can turn into people who are uninformed merely guessing.
The press should act appropriately and with morals, not glorifying the killer.
The job of the media is to give information to the public, hopefully with no bias included based off of the events that took place.
There should be no emphasis placed on the killer, but rather an emphasis placed on the solution to the problem, and what resources could be created or used to fix that problem.
