US newspapers run more photos of school shooting suspects than victims (2018)

https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/newspaper-photos-shooting-suspects-victims/

by okket • 7 years ago

129 104 7 years ago

Isn’t that true of any notorious criminal act in any country? It doesn’t seem like a diversion of what “news” is and what people are interested in reading about.

ronnier• 7 years ago

Yesterday, a Virginia Beach city employee killed 12 people at his workplace. I've seen no pictures of him, I looked at several sources and it seems he's ignored for the most part.

CNN is running pics of the victims https://imgur.com/a/U6A5oCb

Personally I want to know about the murderer. I don't want this hidden from the public.

iaw2• 7 years ago

I've noticed a shift in coverage over the last year or so as well, I suspect all the news organizations finally got their act together about how to cover these stories without causing more damage.

hackermailman• 7 years ago

It's not a school shooting though, the last one I believe was UNC Charlotte and the shooter's multiple pics are all over the stories

snek• 7 years ago

After John Lennon was murdered it became less common for media outlets to publicize the identities of murderers beyond maybe a name and a mugshot.

With the more recent shootings there has been a bit of a revival of going into the profiles of the murderers (mostly, it seems, on cable tv) but that is a bit of a departure of the norm.

curtis• 7 years ago

Personally I want to know about the murderer. I don't want this hidden from the public.

I want to understand what the murderer's motivation was, to the extent that we can. On the other hand, I'd be happy to know that without knowing their name. I don't know if that's practical, but keeping the name out of most news reporting might measurably reduce the murderer's notoriety. I don't know if that would reduce mass shootings in the future, but it seems unlikely that it would hurt.

exabrial3• 7 years ago

The sad thing about the news industry is that the more extreme stories they run, the more money they make.

iaw2• 7 years ago

I wish there was a better model for the news industry but I haven't been able to think of one.

bitttttten• 7 years ago

In a system that is not so strictly for profit, this would exist.

wallace_f• 7 years ago

This graphic has become a recently popular meme on social media, showing how excessive coverage of extreme black swan-type events has influenced the public conciousness: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of-death-i...

cheerlessbog3• 7 years ago

Seems reasonable to me that there's more coverage of terrorism than heart disease. It's less predictable, more diverse, less within my personal control, etc. I'm more interested in the one murder in my town this year than in the hundred deaths from heart disease.

EForEndeavour• 7 years ago

Nice visual, and a similar one could be built to show the incidence and/or prevalence of various cancers versus the number of fundraising events or dollars. Breast and colon cancers would probably stand out as distant outliers in opposite directions.

alexpetralia• 7 years ago

I will leave this great Tweet series by Justin Owings here:

https://twitter.com/justinowings/status/1134423782314192897

deogeo• 7 years ago

"The press may not be successful most of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling them what to think about."

newnewpdro• 7 years ago

Isn't it a common practice to not identify minors in the news?

Glyptodon2• 7 years ago

I can't wait until we get to the point where news broadcasts are basically "bad things happened, but we think it would be best to not get into the ugly specifics. In the meantime here are some photographs of people who could use your prayers."

duality• 7 years ago

That's a far cry from "just the facts" reporting. Is that sort of editorializing in reporting really a step in the right direction?

Glyptodon2• 7 years ago

I guess I needed to put a /s since it wasn't clear.

jMyles9• 7 years ago

The upsetting part isn't the presence or absence in media reports of particular actors in school shootings.

It's the fact that the 23 people killed in school shootings in 2018 - tragic as these deaths are - have managed to take away all the attention from the over 3,000 children killed by motor vehicles that year. I can't help but notice that the media of the US is very reluctant to shine a light on an epidemic whose solution invariably involves cutting into the profits of its oil and automobile sponsors.

I understand that we have a desire to handle both problems, but to the degree that this these are public policy problems, we also need to remember that opportunity cost (for example, in the form of hearing agendas in legislative committee scheduling) is very real - every bit of attention on one problem is indeed a lack of attention on another.

The number of committee meetings in US legislatures (including both houses of congress) over ridiculous cosmetic gun control laws is absurd, while at the same time these bodies barely say a word about the extreme petronormative policies that dominate infrastructure planning and invariably lead to death and permanent disability for more young children than any other cause.

elamje2• 7 years ago

I do agree that news channels rarely cover the statistically significant story such as motor vehicle deaths, etc. However, I think their coverage pattern has a lot more to do with their incentive to maximize their own profit and tell the most inflammatory/engaging story. Cars killing someone isn’t as flashy as a man with a gun.

docbrown2• 7 years ago

Cars killing people also usually do not have a wide reaching effect beyond the community it happened in.

bearcobra• 7 years ago

Provided there is some kind of malicious activity, like drunk driving or manufacturer negligence, I find there to be quite a bit of media coverage of motor vehicle deaths. I'd guess that our perception is that they don't cover it because there are so many distinct events which get short 1 minute nightly news stories, while school shootings tend to result in longer, more focused coverage.

seanmcdirmid4• 7 years ago

Let’s not forget kids starving to death in some parts of Africa while we are at it. And cancer, it kills a lot of kids every year also. So what does that have to do with school shootings? Isn’t this just a huge red herring?

School shootings are not a leading cause of death for kids in the USA. Instead, they cause terror: freaking active shooter drills, metal detectors and security theater, armed campus officers, all the crap that I really don’t want my kids to go through.

jMyles9• 7 years ago

School shootings are not a leading cause of death for kids in the USA. Instead, they cause terror: freaking active shooter drills, metal detectors and security theater, armed campus officers, all the crap that I really don’t want my kids to go through.

Shooting incidents don't cause those things. Administrators and school boards who are unwilling to engage in thought leadership do.

ozim2• 7 years ago

Big part of it is ... intention. If you have human who is willing to kill other people it is at least order of magnitude worse than car accidents or starving to death. If you would have some person starving kids to death intentionally that would be really bad and people would do something about it. But just not getting enough food when a lot of people are already donating loads of money for starving people. It is just, I am sorry, but cannot do anything about it more.

Even if I donate all my earnings to starving children, there still will be some children dying from hunger, I cannot do anything about it.

Shootings in schools are possible to prevent in multiple ways.

I live in Europe and school shootings are not something that happens once a year or twice a year in here like in US. It something that happens once in IDK 10 years or something?

dahart• 7 years ago

I’m not sure I understand your question. If you think that school schooling terror is disproportionate to risk (which it sounds like you do), then aren’t the leading causes of actual death extremely relevant? Kids are much more likely to die in a car than at school, so your strawman about Africa might not be super relevant, but auto accidents in the US and auto safety certainly are something we ought to be paying roughly 100x more attention to in the media than school shootings, right?

jakear• 7 years ago

Do you have some actionable ideas on how to prevent automotive deaths? Honest question.

jMyles9• 7 years ago

Indeed I do.

1) Cease all forms of oil and automobile subsidy.

2) (At the federal level) change the structure of infrastructure aid to states to incentivize pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure over automobiles.

3) Ensure the schools are accessible by pedestrians and cyclists and that they are located in areas which are surrounded by traffic-calming infrastructure.

4) (at the local level) build more curb-extensions, greenways, chicanes, diverters, and other structures to get cars away from schools, playgrounds, and other areas where kids play.

There are sound, scientifically-backed tactics for doing this, but most of them require getting a place on the agendas of several legislative committees who are probably too busy talking about banning a particular color rifle or some other asinine thing.

francisofascii• 7 years ago

To me this is a much more easier problem to solve than the gun deaths issue. You might not like all of these, but here are some effective ideas... Enforce speed limit laws more often. Not just two hours once a month in spots. Enforce no phone use laws. (Stand on any street corner and you will easily spot this issue.) Ban car commercials on TV that display cars speeding. Install speed governors on cars sold in the US. Don't design city streets like highways. Narrow the width of the lanes. Install more round-a-bouts.

bobthepanda• 7 years ago

Most road deaths are caused by issues with road and vehicle design. We know that pedestrians are mostly killed by speed.

1. Where the speed limit is low, the road design should reflect that. Road should be narrower and wind.

2. High speed/high traffic roads should have separated facilities for pedestrians and cyclists. Where they interact, cars should meet pedestrians and cyclists at slow speeds, and at a right angle to reduce blind spots. Pedestrians and cyclists should not have to go very far (height or distance wise) to get to a safe crossing facility, because nobody in their right mind is walking 10-20 minutes, or even 5 minutes out of their way to cross the road directly in front of them. An inconvenient, unusable crossing is not a safe crossing. And people of all ages should be able to cross the entire road in one light cycle.

3. Add another dimension to vehicle safety tests; what is the pedestrian survivability of a head-on impact at 30MPH? I have seen literature suggesting that some part of the increase in road deaths can be attributed to the increasing popularity of SUVs, which are higher off the ground and thus prone to striking pedestrians in more sensitive areas while also giving more leeway for pedestrians to go under the car than over.

umvi2• 7 years ago

Create ML model trained to predict DUI based on lane drift and braking patterns. Start using it to detect violaters and enforcing DUI laws much more strictly. Same with phone users and other types of distracted driving.

docbrown2• 7 years ago

It's the fact that the 23 people killed in school shootings in 2018 - tragic as these deaths are - have managed to take away all the attention from the over 3,000 children killed by motor vehicles that year.

Should we really be comparing the two? I mean, even as a teenage driver, you are warned about the dangers of distracted driving, DD, etc. Automobile accidents are a common occurrence and a risk that people willingly take and accept whenever they enter their car.

I’ve seen multiple stories in a night about automobile crashes on my local news and not national, which is how it should be. Auto accidents usually only affect the community it happened in, not the US as a whole. When we understand the damage—physical and mental—gun violence causes to society as a whole compared to auto accidents, it is no surprise that gun violence is a much more out-of-left-field event than an auto accident.

To combat this, though, would you suggest we ban all motor vehicles? You see how silly that is to read? Even if it is silly to you, attempting to regulate the automotible industry would be a lot harder than putting limitations on available guns. Hell, we don’t even have a solid public transportation system that would be able to handle all of the commuters who gave up their cars to combat the auto accident statistics.

jMyles9• 7 years ago

To combat this, though, would you suggest we ban all motor vehicles? You see how silly that is to read?

I assert that this is a naked strawman. Do you think that Vision Zero and similar projects deserve such a simplistic response?

There are proven ways to reduce automobile deaths, but they require political will and action.

javagram3• 7 years ago

To combat this, though, would you suggest we ban all motor vehicles? You see how silly that is to read? Even if it is silly to you, attempting to regulate the automotible industry would be a lot harder than putting limitations on available guns.

The main way to prevent these types of mass shootings would be to ban almost all guns. Some might say that is also “silly” to read. Politicians typically point to a specific type such as military-style semiautomatic rifles (“assault weapons”) that are scary—looking but aren’t especially deadly or even commonly used for mass shootings. This most recent mass shooting was committed with a .45 pistol.

Unlike car ownership, gun ownership is also a constitutional right here in the USA, which means you’d need a huge supermajority to repeal that portion of the constitution.

cheerlessbog3• 7 years ago

What reason do you have to believe we can't tackle both problems at once? Society confronts countless major problems concurrently. You could equally argue that every moment spent considering automobile accidents is time that could be better spent confronting climate change.

yumraj2• 7 years ago

I'm not sure I agree as we cannot put accidental deaths, even with large total numbers, and mass homicide in the same bucket.

Moreover, when there were mass accidental deaths, as in the case of recent Boeing Max's, there was enough coverage.

NullPrefix• 7 years ago

Moreover, when there were mass accidental deaths, as in the case of recent Boeing Max's, there was enough coverage.

You mean mass negligence deaths?

gridlockd4• 7 years ago

I can't help but notice that the media of the US is very reluctant to shine a light on an epidemic whose solution invariably involves cutting into the profits of its oil and automobile sponsors.

The media is reluctant to shine a light on behavior where the viewer is responsible.

The media knows very well that their average viewer is an irresponsible fool, but they also know that viewers don't like to be lectured to.

It also just so happens that large parts of the US are either unlivable without a car, or unaffordable. That's just the reality, maybe a 50-year infrastructure plan on behalf of chairman Sanders will change that, but not much else.

Every time you hear about guns killing children, challenge the narrative by saying, "is talking about this taking away from our opportunities to rethink some of our car-dominated infrastructure?"

The word for that kind of behavior is "whataboutism". It's not going to win you anything.

philwelch2• 7 years ago

It’s not even car accidents. Roughly 300 Americans die every year from getting tangled in their bedsheets. Mass shootings tend to be 1/10th as deadly as bedsheets, and approximately as deadly as dog bites.

simion3144• 7 years ago

Car accidents happen so often hat people would probably demand not to see daily this tragic events.

When I was a child (25 years ago) we had only 1 TV channel, and weekly there was 30 minutes broadcast only about road accidents, it was created in collaboration with the police and the purpose was educative, to show the consequences of not respecting the rules.

The problem this days is that media needs to make money and not to educate, even the national TV and radio needs to compete with the private TV so everything now is similar on all channels mostly.

Edit: I still see traffic accidents reportd on our local news here, is this not happening in US but on the local news? Or is your point that there should be a news item for each car accident, I don't think you can compare a regular accident with a mass shooting though, maybe with a regular shooting. a mass shooting is more like an accident involving a bus full of children.

rdiddly2• 7 years ago

It's not just the sponsors who have skin in that game, unfortunately - it's 95% of everybody. How many people bike or walk to work at a given media outlet? At a given school? Maybe one guy they all think of as eccentric, plus an intern who's young and broke? The rest [Edit: ...who don't take transit] drive because (ironically) the number of cars on the roads makes it too unsafe to do anything but add another car. [Edit: Or because they bought a house so far from work that it would be an athletic event they're not up for.] How do you get someone to confront a problem where they are the shooter?

Alex3917• 7 years ago

All new cars sold in the US are going to have basic self-driving ability in less than four years. So that is already going to eventually reduce deaths by up to 80%.

newsguy212• 7 years ago

Quasi burner account here -- I've worked in news my entire adult life, and have thought about this stuff a lot -- and why we cover the things we do.

Let's look at this through the lens of something less emotionally fraught. My girlfriend used to be absolutely terrified to fly. I kept telling her that we were way more likely to get into an accident in the Uber on the way to the airport than the flight itself, but that didn't always help. She may have understood that intellectually, but emotionally, there was a disconnect. Here's my hypothesis:

- News Coverage -- (and ill get to this more in a sec.) The news (at least in any decent size market) cannot POSSIBLY cover every motor vehicle crash. They are far too common, and, therefore, probably not news. I suppose you could cover something like an uptick in motor vehicle crashes, or an abnormally dangerous intersection, but at that point you're now talking about a trend and not a specific incident with specific victims, and you might as well be talking about a budget.

- Fundamental understanding of the mechanics -- The average person can probably tell you why a car moves. Now, I am not saying they will be doing their own oil changes or any more serious car maintenance (I live in NYC and do not even own a car), but they can probably tell you about the pistons and the engine and how it turns the wheels and stuff. Ask an average person why a 175,000 lb metal jetliner can soar five miles over the surface of the earth for hours at a time, and I am less confident you will get a reasonable answer. And even if you do, there may be less of a connection between the words they are saying and whether or not they really believe it. Planes in the sky are magic.

- Who is in control -- Most of the time if you are in a car, you are driving -- or, someone you know and trust is driving. (I say most because of cabs and Ubers and maybe a carpool that you just don't like.) Human beings tend to believe that THEY can avoid danger. Yes, those other people crashed their cars, but I'm a GOOD DRIVER. When you're in an airplane and watching "The Hangover II" (what an amazingly bad movie, btw) you have to trust a stranger to fly this thing that you don't really understand (see above point.)

So -- same thing with mass shootings. They're rare (or at least used to be, I do wonder if the recent uptick in shootings is having an effect on people's interest, though thats another issue. They are still rare, compared to things like car crashes.)

- We can cover school/workplace/church/etc shootings because they're aren't 20 in an hour. - We don't really understand why someone would be driven to do this. Much like maybe knowing how a plane works, we may be able to spout talking points about mental health and access to weapons and all of that, but we (hopefully?) cannot REALLY understand what drives a person to wake up in the morning, assemble an arsenal, and murder a bunch of people. There's a form of fascination to this, regardless of how perverse. - Once again, we are not in control. We might be driving the car, and think we can swerve out of the way when we need to, but if you are sitting in an office/school/church and someone comes in firing an automatic weapon, you are fundamentally not in control of the situation.

News reflects what people are interested in, or at least it should. For all of the talk about what the media covers, there really isnt a "THE MEDIA." The media is a group of people like me who live in communities and have friends and families, and -- I hate to break this to you -- while we may have pressures from external sources direct or indirect, we do not have weekly meetings where we conspire what agendas we want to push or make people fear. (They became monthly meetings because of a problem with the caterer.)

People are afraid of school shootings, much like they can be afraid of plane crashes. They dont understand them. They fear not being in control. They are rare. It's harder to say "that won't be me. And so news covers it, and parents worry, and citizens demand solutions*

*Also I hope it goes without saying that there SHOULD be a solution. We don't take car crashes lying down -- there are constant safety improvements added on to cars that have made driving fundamentally safer.

petoskystone• 7 years ago

Welcome to America

dang• 7 years ago

Could you please not post unsubstantive comments or flamebait to HN? You've done quite a bit of that already, and it's against the site rules and we ban accounts that do it.

If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended, we'd be grateful.

You might also find these links helpful for getting the spirit of the site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

elamje2• 7 years ago

Should people be surprised by that? Turn on any major news channel and you will instantly see evidence that bad news sells better than good news.

Newspapers are businesses and most have a simple equation in mind when deciding what content to use: use x s.t. x maximizes profit

Hopefully younger people will start to move away from traditional news sources as they realize how it skews ones world view towards negativity.

marak830• 7 years ago

IMO they are. I teach k12 esl(pre:edit, kindergarten to year 12 English as a second language), my highest levels - free conversation we tried a spot where students would tell us about an interesting news story they had seen, heard or read about in the last week. We have dropped that idea. 30 students over a month we're regularly admitting to not actually knowing any real news outside of their immediate circle.

Note that these students arnt known for slacking off when it comes to homework, we deliberately didn't set a goal, it was something we planned to ask in class without notice.

Small sample, absolutely. But it was eye opening for the 4 teachers in this.

Not sure if this will help the conversation, but a little anecdote doesn't hurt every now and then :-)

frosted-flakes• 7 years ago

Personally, I've actively avoided reading the news lately. It just seems so pointless--what do I gain by reading about President Trump's latest antics or how bad the housing market is? I used to read my small city's local newspaper (hard copy) because it was news that actually applied to me, but it got shut down a year or two ago (unfortunately).

The only time I'll read the news is during an election, because I want to be at least somewhat informed.

Otherwise, I might hear about it from others or if it shows up on HN.

b_tterc_p3• 7 years ago

Is this a relevant metric? Why do we want to show pictures of victims? If I got killed in a shooting I don’t think I would want my picture thrown all over the news, nor do I think it would be particularly good for my family.

Swizec• 7 years ago

Same reason as why celebrities are reported “Found dead in a bath tub” and not “Committed suicide”. It discourages copycats.

In some way the more you talk about the perps, the more you’re saying “You can do this and then you will be famous”

zamadatix• 7 years ago

Since it's usually "Found dead in bath tub... from apparent suicide" I assumed it was just a more attention grabbing headline.

casefields• 7 years ago

People have a knee-jerk reaction that publishing photos glorifies said person. So to many, the journalists are glorifying the killer and not the victims.

sailingparrot• 7 years ago

How is it a 'knee-jerk reaction' exactly? It seems to me it is well known that many of the perpetrators indeed do it in the hope of being glorified and being talked about.

philwelch2• 7 years ago

It’s not a “knee-jerk reaction”; it’s established science that publicizing mass shooters (and even comparing their death tolls, as some media outlets do) leads to media contagion (ie copycat behavior).

darkpuma2• 7 years ago

"Abstract: Fatal crashes of private, business and corporate-executive airplanes have increased after publicized murder-suicides. The more publicity given to a murder-suicide, the more crashes occurred. The increase in plane crashes occurred primarily in states where the murder-suicides were publicized. These findings suggest that murder-suicide stories trigger subsequent murder-suicides, some of which are disguised as airplane crashes."

Phillips, David P. “Airplane Accident Fatalities Increase Just After Newspaper Stories About Murder and Suicide.” Science, vol. 201, no. 4357, 1978, pp. 748–750. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1746810.

(https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.201.4357.748)

b_tterc_p3• 7 years ago

I get that we don’t want to glorify killers, but I don’t see why we want to instead show victims

tinus_hn• 7 years ago

So what do you think about the strategy to emphasize the names of the victims instead of granting the killer notoriety?

lostmymind66• 7 years ago

It really depends on the suspect. If the suspect is a white supremacist, it's all over the news immediately. If it doesn't fit the current narrative, we might see the suspect 3 days later.

I've been recently paying attention to this and one of the latest shootings involved a trans student in the process of transitioning. It had barely any coverage.

There really is a bias in the media that is now bordering on censorship.

armenarmen• 7 years ago

Not disagreeing that shooters who do t fit the narrative get less coverage, but I’d also point out that the shooting you’re describing in Colorado had a (thankfully) very low body count

finnthehuman• 7 years ago

Showing victims vs suspects is a con. It's not a secret how to responsibly cover shootings in the news, and hasn't been for 30 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4

vbuwivbiu• 7 years ago

Fact is that shooters and serial killers are idolized by the press and Hollywood. Every time there's a school shooting (every other week) the press shows images of the shooter and a bunch of teenagers is inspired to do the same. We make movies & TV series about serial killers. Scroll through Netflix and every other thumbnail has a gun. It's constantly reinforced in our minds.

userbinator• 7 years ago

Could it simply be because they want people to be aware of the suspect and report sightings, in the cases where the suspect hasn't been caught yet?

Victims are harmless. If not caught, the suspect isn't. Hence the latter gets far more attention.

rdiddly2• 7 years ago

To the degree that we're talking about actual newsPAPERS (and the use of the term "front page" leads me to believe she is), this is probably a simple question of space. If one guy shoots another, you can probably run photos of both. But if one guy shoots 10, a photo of one shooter takes up a lot fewer column-inches than photos of 10 victims. If you're really intent on running photos of all 10 victims, you'll probably scale them down, maybe arrange them 5 x 2 in one panel that's collectively larger than one shooter-photo but smaller individually.

In other words, mass-shooting victims are pictured less often, and smaller, for the simple reason that there are more of them. Maybe not the best reason, but that's precisely my point; no editor decides like "Hey the shooter is way more important and awesome, let's run his photo up front, and fuck the victims amirite!?"

This comment certified Hanlon's Razor compliant.

US newspapers run more photos of school shooting suspects than victims (2018)

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