What We Need to Know

To start with, this isn’t about gun control. I want to talk about media coverage of mass shootings, and the information we need and don’t need. To their credit, the major media in general are aware of the role they play in these incidents and are trying to make adjustments.

First, there is the response right after the incident. The pressure is on to hit the air or the Internet live, with anchors at the mercy of the waves of constantly changing data coming at them. That information arrives in spurts. The anchors have little to fill the spaces in between but platitudes and speculation and, of course, social media phone videos.

It is amazing to me, when there’s a shooting and people are running for their lives, how many have enough presence of mind (or as a colleague calls it, stupidity) to record the whole thing on their phones, with jerky pictures, as they flee. What are the poor anchors to do but run them as they arrive? The trouble is, they don’t stop. The videos run for hours, even for days, in spilt-screen, even while authorities are providing real facts about what happened. Enough, already.

Then there is the issue of the shooter’s name. Some media won’t use it at all, for fear of glorifying the individual. The problem with this is, we do need to know who it is, their background, what the motive may have been, and whether they worked alone.

In this regard, I’m in favor of more information rather than less. It’s increasingly clear that while each case is individual,  most of these incidents seem to follow a pattern. Working with patterns is how weather forecasters have learned to predict storms with more and more accuracy, and provide better warning. The same is true of earthquakes. There are more sensors around, and while each quake is unique, they also tend to follow patterns, allowing the provision of even a few seconds of warning now. These principles could apply to mass shooting incidents, where the red-flagging of certain individuals might prevent tragedy.

I’m not suggesting here that the media start calling out suspicious people before they commit crimes. But digging into the motives of perpetrators when these incidents do happen results in educating the rest of us about why they get so frickin’ angry, as the Gilroy guy apparently said he was.

Each one of us is like one of those earthquake sensors. I hope we can develop some kind of reasonable red-flag laws to stop shooters before they start, but for these laws to work, we all have to know what the red flags look like in the first place, and through telling us these stories, the media can help us do that.