The Media and Mass Murder

And then, a couple of months later, Robert Hawkins is saying, "Now I'll be famous."
Why would it surprise us? Let me explain, going back a little bit. Typically, a mass killer is a middle-aged man. He's in his 30s, 40s, or 50s and at the very time of his life when he feels he should be reaching the pinnacle of success, he's instead floundering. And that's part of the motivation for his suicidal rampage. But all of a sudden lately we're seeing young people commit these hideous crimes that were formerly associated with middle age. And what has happened is this: if one person is killed in a local community the story is important and it is a tragedy, but it is also a local story. It doesn't get national press. But when 32 people are killed by a mass murderer, when eight people are killed in a shopping mall, it becomes a national story and it's covered widely. So 25 years ago a young person … who was being bullied or whose life was miserable might be inspired by the kids down the block or someone on the next street. Now young people are being inspired by what happens in West Paducah or Jonesboro or what was the name of that town in Alaska? Bethel. There was a massacre there as well. One of the school shooters was there, Evan Ramsey. He killed two people. [Ramsey was convicted as an adult of two counts of murder and was sentenced to two 99-year terms.] But a town of 500 that almost no one had ever heard of before all of a sudden had become the inspiration for some bullied youngster or some guy who's working at a McDonald's and has no hope for his future, who's been rejected by his girlfriend, who gets fired at work, has nothing going for himself, maybe has no friends. He can be a big shot for the first time, using what happened a thousand miles away or maybe 3,000 miles away as a role model for his own behavior.

Should the media consider censoring itself?
The media have not only a right but a responsibility to inform the public. This is, after all, a huge story just by virtue of the large body count alone. Not to mention that these were strangers who had no relationship to the killer. They were minding their own business and what did they get for it? Death by gunfire. So, it's an important story and it needs to be told … However, what we don't want to do is to give these murders excessive attention. And we also don't want to make these villains into victims by delving into every detail of their biographies, showing how they suffered as children, how they were abused and abandoned and neglected and sexually stimulated by a parent or adopted under terrible circumstances. Then we just play right into it by reducing the culpability of the killer … The second thing is we don't want to put them in positions where we glamorize and romanticize them … I find it very dangerous to place them in positions where we put celebrities. Most of the school shootings that we remember, especially the ones that happened in middle and high schools, occurred from 1996 through 2001. And then after September 11, 2001, for a period of time we had almost no school shootings in this country. Why? Well, the answer is for a period of time we switched, we refocused our attention away from the school shootings and toward the war on terror, thereby robbing the copycat of its influence in providing publicity for young people who wanted to feel important and to get some attention from the media.

© 2007