On vacation for the first half of
July, I returned to a stack of newspapers and relentless heat that seemed to
follow me across the country, from Wisconsin to rural Missouri to the entire
breadth of Pennsylvania and back home again to the Dairy State.
Then came the events of last Friday,
shortly after midnight, in Aurora, Colo. And the old newspapers sitting on my
desk suddenly were even more obsolete.
The way the story of the Dark Knight
shootings that killed a dozen people and left scores more wounded and scarred,
physically and emotionally was reported was in itself another sign of our media
revolution, as Megan Garber writes
on the website of The Atlantic.
But of course, from a media
standpoint, one tradition didn’t disappoint: the rounds of soul-searching. Of
that there’s been no shortage. Among the most thoughtful reflections I found
were David Carr’s column in the New York
Times, Jack Shafer’s meditation at the
Reuters website, and the 2-1/2-minute clip that Jay Rosen posted on his Tumblr page
about how the media should cover such horrific mass killings in a way as to
reduce their likelihood of recurring.
As Rosen writes:
What bothers me most about the coverage
of these things is the atmosphere of excitement that creeps in. The tone should
be business-like, informational, the voice of someone resigned to the fact that
crimes like this happen but determined to deny the killer any hint of glamour.
An excess of sobriety to frustrate his craving for notoriety.
I don’t fundamentally disagree with
the preferences expressed in the clip, and which Rosen endorses, on how the
media should cover such horrific events. And I sadly concur with those who
suggest that it’s unlikely we’ll see them turn over their coverage style
anytime soon, given how deeply ingrained the habits of mind are that give rise
to the sort of stories complained about in the video.
Still, I do question at least part
of the underlying premise for the campaign to make coverage more restrained,
even if I think we’d all be better off for it.
Implicit in some of these arguments
is the idea that, to some extent, events such as these give rise to “copycat”
incidents. Heading off such “copycat” crimes was said to be a top priority of
authorities last Friday as Americans woke up to the news of the horrific
bloodshed in Aurora. The same fear of “copycats” surfaces again and again in
the wake of similar monstrous acts.
Yet is there really much grounds for
such fear? I found myself asking that question after reading such a story on
Friday. Yet while an
entire book was published in 2004 called The Copycat Effect that blamed media and pop culture for triggering
waves of crimes as well as suicides, beyond that there seems to be little hard
data supporting the thesis.
The
Washington Post’s Paul Farhi asked it as well, and (unlike me) did
some real reporting. “The answer to that question is murky,” Farhi writes.
And even one of the experts who has helped advance the notion that sensational
publicity of certain crimes may spur repeats by others acknowledges, “The empirical
evidence isn’t strong. It’s really all anecdotal.”
Commenting on his colleague’s story
and the rush to judgment by media outlets warning of the risk of copycats, Post opinion blogger Eric Wemple lectures
his colleagues: “In other words, media: Do your work.”
And whatever the degree of truth or
falsity there is to the “copycat” meme, it doesn’t take away from a larger
message that the media needs to remember in moments of chaos, confusion and
collective horror triggered by events like the shootings in Aurora: Sometimes,
the best thing is to sit down, shut up, and wait until there’s enough to really
understand what happened.
Several commenters made that point
last week: Matt Welch at
the libertarian magazine and website Reason.com,
Charlie Pierce in his
political blog at Esquire
magazine’s website, but most trenchantly, Dave Cullen, author of a book on the
Columbine school shootings 13 years ago in Colorado.
Cullen’s book is possibly the
definitive story of those events – and it also, he notes, sought to correct a
lot of what became the conventional wisdom growing out of it. And writing
Sunday in The New York Times, he cops to the role he helped play earlier in
creating that conventional wisdom, when he was “part of the first wave of
reporters to descend on Columbine High School the afternoon it was attacked”:
I
ran with the journalistic pack that created the myths we are still living with.
We created those myths for one reason: we were trying to answer the burning
question of why, and we were trying to answer it way too soon. I spent 10 years
studying Columbine, and we all know what happened there, right? Two outcast
loners exacted revenge against the jocks for relentlessly bullying them.
Not
one bit of that turned out to be true.
Words to remember as we nurse our
sorrows and ponder what to make of a deadly midnight tragedy.
*
Local journalist Steve Schuster is
energetically seeking to revive the Society for Professional Journalists
locally.
To that end, he and other organizers
will hold a kickoff meeting on Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Buffalo Wild Wings
outlet at 2635 N. Mayfair Road near Mayfair Mall in Wauwatosa. If you’re a pro
journalist, check it out.
*
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