Newtown, Connecticut Elementary School Shooting

[Reach]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

From http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/...311070301/1023

Robert Ebert:

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.


Edit: Also see

Good to see someone with a functional brain.

I don't see why media outlets can't be banned from mentioning any names of people involved in these types of crimes, displaying their pictures, or talking about any of their life events etc.

I suppose you could turn the argument full circle and blame everyone, because it's obvious that people are inherently interested in morbid shit like this, whether we want to admit it or not.

But I don't agree with exploiting this for profit. At least we can do something about censoring the media and hopefully preventing acts like this from happening again and escalating to probably even greater extremes. It seems inevitable at this point, if coverage continues the way it does. Attempting to beef security or other nonsense fails to address the issue and is analogous to trying to bandage a punctured jugular.