Columbine. Sandy Hook. Virginia Tech. All names of places that now strike fear in the heart of many due to acts perpetrated by a few disturbed individuals. Sadly, there are a dozen more locations that could be listed, places that in the last few decades have become the setting for horrible acts of violence committed in the name of some futile cause. These mass murders have become so commonplace that the country almost expects to see or hear about one in the news weekly. Over the last thirty years, this country has experienced more and more horror as mass shootings seem to multiply in number and the body count rises.
Despite all the studies and research done on the events and the people who commit these heinous crimes, no good solution has definitively presented itself. Yet one factor is consistently present in every shooting – mass media coverage. Experts have come to suggest that journalists and the news media may be unintentionally perpetrating copycat mass shootings in America by glorifying these acts and the individuals committing these crimes. Journalists, and the news and print media they create, have been a staple for providing information to the American public for centuries.
So much so that the profession as a whole has developed several techniques to deliver this material in a manner that informs the viewer while holding the public’s interest for as long as possible. Frame-changing is one of these processes and refers to the journalistic practice of presenting news coverage through different topic frames over the life span of a news event (Schildkraut, 2013, p. 25). This process allows the media to highlight different facts about a news story all while changing the manner in which the story itself is presented.
It provides a fresh look at content to keep viewers interested in an older story, but still disseminates the same facts repeatedly. “Agenda setting” is another technique the news uses in broadcasting data. This method refers to the process by which certain issues or events are selected and highlighted by journalists or others groups and singled out to define and shape issues and events the public watches (Schildkraut, 2013, p. 27). When mass shootings occur the event garners tons of media attention because of the subject matter and the interest of the public in the event.
Due to the marathon of coverage aimed at these occurrences, intentionally or not, the media is shaping how this violence is defined by American society. Many experts believe the way in which would-be murderers process the media coverage of these crimes inspires them to commit copycat homicides of their own. This is due largely in part to the way these individuals assimilate events and incorporate them into their own actions. Some people believe that this is due to some form of mental illness.
While it is true that a majority of perpetrators suffer from some form of antisocial personality disorder, the frequency of psychosis or severe mental illness amongst mass shooters is surprisingly rare (Mesoudi, 2013). Dr. Alex Mesoudi, who studies evolutionary psychology at Durham University, published a study regarding the ways in which people observe actions of individuals and then copy those that they deem successful. He states in his study that “preferentially copying successful individuals is an effective method of learning used by a large population of the world” (Mesoudi, 2008, p. 361).
The key words in this study are “successful individuals”. While the general public may not view the murderers in mass shootings as “successful”, those disturbed individuals who choose to emulate them see the shooters’ stories as tales of successful completion of the mission at hand – murdering the largest number of people probable with the most notoriety achieved as possible. Mesoudi continues on to say that recent research in the evolutionary behavioral sciences suggest that media-driven copycat effects might be an unfortunate but predictable side effect of our evolved, adaptive psychology.
Both adults and children spontaneously choose to copy people who they have previously seen succeed at a task, and ignore unsuccessful people. Furthermore, the clues used to copy can be quite minimal, individuals preferring to copy people who are looked at by other people for longer (Mesoudi, 2013). Even the FBI has raised concerns about links between media coverage and copycats, stating “School shootings and other violent incidents that receive intense media attention can generate threats or copycat violence elsewhere. Copycat behavior is very common, in fact.
Anecdotal evidence strongly indicates that threats increase in schools nationwide after a shooting has occurred anywhere in the United States” (O’Toole, 2001, p. 24). As the news broadcasts minute-by-minute coverage of the victims, the scene of the crime, the survivors and every possible facet of the killer’s lives, the reporters are only allowing these criminals to achieve their desired end result of world-wide infamy. The internet alone provides access to an infinite number of details about the murders, the manifestos and postings of the perpetrators or even live-feed video clips from the killings and crime scenes.
Adding all these factors together creates the environment for a perfect storm. Sherry Towers, a research professor at Arizona State University, is striving to provide a provable, scientific link between media coverage and copycat murders. Her team examines databases containing information on high-profile mass killings and school shootings in the United States and attempt to determine if these tragedies inspire similar events in the near future. Her group has determined that these events have in fact shown a pattern they call “contagion”, which is when patterns of many events are bunched in time, rather than occurring randomly in time.
The period of contagion Tower’s research has uncovered spans the thirteen days after the initial event, providing data that twenty to thirty percent of copycat killings occur during this time period (Long, 2015, p. 11). A similar phenomenon has shown itself in research about highly publicized suicides and copycat events. While suicides and mass shootings are not technically the same event, people’s response to them seems to be similar, providing a starting point for scientists trying to find a copycat link with mass murderers and the media.
A total of 293 findings from 42 studies showed that the effect of a highly broadcasted entertainment or celebrity suicide showed results where a copycat was 14. 3 times more likely to occur. Often the greatest reduction in copycats from these studies came from simply reducing the sheer quantity of the news on the suicide as opposed to reducing the perceived quality of the news reporting (Stack, 2003, p. 238, 240). The way in which the shooters and their copy cats carry out their crimes might also lead people to believe that a barrage of media coverage might instigate further violent acts.
Paul Mullen, director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health, published a study based on partly on interviews he conducted with rampage shooters who survived their acts. Mullen stated that the perpetrators tended to follow a definite pattern, what he called a program for murder and suicide, and would indiscriminately kill where killing people was their primary aim. They typically had no plan for escape and supposed they would either kill themselves or be killed by the police.
Further, they would plan these actions meticulously, even ritualistically, for months in advance, in accordance with a highly obsessive and organized personality (Schulman, 2013). There is no doubt that the media has every right, and every responsibility, to report the news when these fantastical crimes happen. Not only because the First Amendment guarantees that right, but because the American public has a right to know when these events occur. The question is not so much should the news broadcast the shootings, but what information about the crimes should be disseminated to the public.