Do media vultures perpetuate mass shootings?

[DonViejo]

We remember the killers' names, but not the victims'. And sloppy, prurient reporting may be exacerbating the crimes

BY RIN KELLY

Outside Columbine High on the day of the attacks, a photographer standing near me flipped open a phone and cheered, excitement uncontained: “It’s Pulitzer time!” This man knew I could hear him. He just didn’t care. At the time — and in my shock — I registered disgust, but commercial journalism wasn’t yet my life’s loudest bully. Before the month was over, there would be a Japanese reporter camping out in a car outside my house. When someone from our shattered family came or went, he would scramble out of the car, seeking salable dirt on the shooters. They had been students in one of my mom’s classes. My aunt taught English to several of their victims.

My aunt called the reporters “carrion birds.” My mom was too stunned to say much of anything about them. It fell to me to field their calls: “Columbine,” this thing that wounded 24 and killed 13 and almost took my mother, was an all-day, wall-to-wall media happening. A pair of journalists from the New York Times even used an enrolled student as a ruse. My mom arrived at a coffee shop to tutor a boy who’d been unable to return to school, and there they were, tagging along. Interrupting education. Seeking any small anecdote on murderers the 24-hour news cycle had already turned forever into figures of anti-heroic intrigue.

The way our news media descends on a community in crisis, thieves its grief, and overlays false narratives atop the real can be permanently and alienatingly traumatic. Putting children before cameras in Newtown, Conn., simply to have traumatized children on camera is the newest and most plainly grotesque of these acts. At their most obvious, these approaches read as exploitation, as the thoughtless story-scramble we all know and loathe. The subtler cruelty comes in the long-term effects of speculation and copycat-baiting; of simplification and assumption and shallow debate; of turning a living place into its most horrific day — “Newtown,” “Aurora,” “Columbine” — and then refusing to let the locals opt out of endless, image-bloated reruns. The despair such violence leaves behind is enormous, and mediatization of that trauma is an augmented, ongoing pain. Many of those locals will be dealing with it — forced forever to happen upon the murderer’s face, to read and hear his name — long after their dead have been relegated nationally to a mere class of people, a media-designated group: The Newtown Victims.

Six days after the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech, the student government there voted to kick outside media off campus entirely. Amie Steele, then a junior serving as editor-in-chief of the Collegiate Times, remembers how disruptive their presence became. “At one point, there was a student obviously crying at the memorial set up on the Drillfield,” she says. “A cameraman came over and had the camera inches from her face. She turned to him and asked him to not record her. The cameraman replied that his producer sent him out to find a good shot of a student crying, and she had a good crying expression.”

-snip-

more:
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/29/do_media_vultures_perpetuate_mass_shootings/