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Jun 15 2016 06:39am
In light of the recent tragedy that took place in Orlando the other night, a great deal of discussion and debate has occurred regarding mass shootings in relation to gun control, mental health services, radical Islam and terrorism. Invariably, there is a mass shooting epidemic that is plaguing the United States, and people have argued those aforementioned points in an attempt to figure out solutions to reduce mass shootings.

However, there is one other major factor that I (and others) would argue plays a significant role in the proliferation of mass shootings in the United States, and that is the media involved with mass shootings, and the consumption of that media. Undoubtedly, the power and influence of the media is significant, and the fields of psychology and sociology have explored the extent of that power for decades, and it is from these fields that I generate my argument.

I argue that media obsession with mass shooters has led to making shooters famous, almost like a quasi-celebration, and contributes to inspiring future shooters. To this end, not only do the media have a journalistic ethical responsibility to be cognizant of how they report on mass shootings, but that also we as consumers of media have an ethical responsibility in not contributing to making shooters famous. That this type of media reporting plays a direct role in explaining, in part, the increase of frequency of mass shootings in the United States.

I’m curious to see whether other people in PaRD either agree or disagree with this argument, and if you do agree, to what extent and what possible solutions do you think should be made?

My argument stems from what is called the Werther Effect, which is an observation that originated in response to an influx of suicide/copy-cat suicides that were associated with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Two main contemporary examples of the Werther Effect include media reports of the suicides of famous people, notably: Ruan Lingyu, the Japanese musicians Yukiko Okada, Miyu Uehara and hide, and Marilyn Monroe, whose death was followed by an increase of 200 more suicides than average for that August month.

The other main example is the self-immolation protest by Mohamed Bouazizi, who was a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on December 17th, 2010 in protest of the confiscation of his wares and the harassment and humiliation that he reported was inflicted on him by a municipal official and his aides. His act became a catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution and the wider Arab Spring, inciting demonstrations and riots throughout Tunisia in protest of social and political issues in the country.

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Bouazizi's actions triggered the Werther effect, causing a number of self-immolations in protests emulating Bouazizi's in several other countries in the Greater Middle East and Europe. In Algeria in particular, protests against rising food prices and spreading unemployment have resulted in many self-immolations. The first reported case following Bouazizi's death was that of Mohsen Bouterfif, a 37-year-old father of two, who set himself on fire when the mayor of Boukhadra in Algeria refused to meet with him and others regarding employment and housing requests on 13 January 2011. According to a report in El-Watan, the mayor challenged him, saying if he had courage he would immolate himself by fire as Bouazizi had done. He died on 24 January. Maamir Lotfi, a 36-year-old unemployed father of six, also denied a meeting with the governor, burned himself in front of the El Oued town hall on 17 January, dying on 12 February. Abdelhafid Boudechicha, a 29-year-old day laborer who lived with his parents and five siblings, burned himself in Medjana on 28 January over employment and housing issues. He died the following day.

In the six months immediately after Mohamed Bouazizi's death on 4 January 2011, at least 107 Tunisians tried to kill themselves by setting themselves on fire. The men who self-immolated were mostly young unmarried men from poor, rural areas, and had only basic education. Amenallah Messaadi, who collated the figures and is head of the Burns Centre, said that people shouldn't glorify the act of self-immolation and "should stop adding fuel to the fire".”


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi#Copycat_incidents

This media-fueled social contagion of suicide has been widely recognized and observed, with major suicide prevention organizations even having entire sections of their website devoted to providing guidance to media outlets reporting suicide. For instance, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has a section that says:

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• More than 50 research studies worldwide have found that certain types of news coverage can increase the likelihood of suicide in vulnerable individuals. The magnitude of the increase is related to the amount, duration and prominence of coverage.
• Risk of additional suicides increases when the story explicitly describes the suicide method, uses dramatic/ graphic headlines or images, and repeated/extensive coverage sensationalizes or glamorizes a death.
• Covering suicide carefully, even briefly, can change public misperceptions and correct myths, which can encourage those who are vulnerable or at risk to seek help.


http://afsp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/recommendations.pdf

Other countries have recognized this phenomenon too, and have guidelines for their own media. Even the World Health Organization has guidelines.

http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/resource_media.pdf

Increasingly, in modern times, the Werther Effect has been suggested to apply to more than just suicide, and that it applies to essentially all forms of maladaptive social behavior. To this end, it means that it also potentially applies to mass shootings. First, however, to even attempt to prove that this is the case or at least a possibility, it must first be shown that there is an increase in the frequency of mass shootings in the United States. Mass shooting research can be tricky at times, because different bodies of government or pieces of research operationally define “mass shootings” in different ways. For instance, in the past the FBI used a definition up until 2013 in which at least 4 people had to be killed in a place of public use for it to be considered in mass shooting data. Recently, however, federal statutes have defined a mass shooting as a shooting that occurs in a place of public use and that:

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the term `mass killings' means 3 or more killings in a single incident


https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-112publ265/html/PLAW-112publ265.htm

Accepting that there hasn’t historically been a singular widely accepted definition of mass shooting, I’ll include a table here that compiles different bodies of research on mass shooting in the United States over time.



The Mother Jones data is, to me, the most reliable and accurate. They clarified how they defined a mass shooting, and put out that:

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Our focus is on public mass shootings in which the motive appeared to be indiscriminate killing. We used the following criteria to identify cases:

• The perpetrator took the lives of at least four people. An FBI crime classification report identifies an individual as a mass murderer—versus a spree killer or a serial killer—if he kills four or more people in a single incident (not including himself), typically in a single location.
• The killings were carried out by a lone shooter. (Except in the case of the Columbine massacre and the Westside Middle School killings, which involved two shooters.)
• The shootings occurred in a public place. (Except in the case of a party on private property in Crandon, Wisconsin, and another in Seattle, where crowds of strangers had gathered.) Crimes primarily related to gang activity, armed robbery, or domestic violence in homes are not included.
• Perpetrators who died or were wounded during the attack are not included in the victim counts.
• We included a handful of cases also known as "spree killings"—cases in which the killings occurred in more than one location over a short period of time, that otherwise fit the above criteria.


Even then, despite the differences that the definitions translate to in terms of the data, no matter which definition you accept or use, the fact remains that they all show there to be an increase in the frequency of mass shootings over several decades. To back this up, a recent Harvard study showed that the average number of days between mass shootings in the United States has decreased significantly in recent years.



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As the chart above shows, a public mass shooting occurred on average every 172 days since 1982. The orange reference line depicts this average; data points below the orange line indicate shorter intervals between incidents, i.e., mass shootings occurring at a faster pace. Since September 6, 2011, there have been 14 public mass shootings at an average interval of less than 172 days. A run of nine points or more below the orange average line is considered a statistical signal that the underlying process has changed. (A nine-point run below the average is about as likely to occur by chance as flipping a coin nine times and getting heads nine times in a row—the probability is less than 1 percent. The 14-point run we see here is even more unlikely to have occurred by chance.) The standard interpretation of this chart would be that mass shootings, as of September 2011, are now part of a new, accelerated, process. Because the chart signals that a new process started around September 2011, we can divide the chart at that point to analyze each phase separately. In the first 29-year phase, mass shootings occurred every 200 days on average. In the subsequent three-year phase, mass shootings occurred every 64 days on average:




http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/mass-shootings-increasing-harvard-research

Establishing that mass shootings have been occurring more frequently is only half the battle in terms of this argument. The other half is to show whether or not mass shooters are indeed being inspired in some way by past mass shooters. To this point, I turn to examples of recent mass shooters.

1. The Columbine shooting has gone on to have quite the cult following, with some even saying that there exists a “Columbine Effect”, because the incident has inspired so many different instances of copycats. Mother Jones worked with law enforcement officials to identify cases where Columbine copycats were known:

http://i68.tinypic.com/20i89vr.png

ABC also has a post about the Columbine Effect too: http://abcnews.go.com/US/columbine-shootings-grim-legacy-50-school-attacks-plots/story?id=26007119

2. The Roanoke shooter, who shot two of his former TV reporter colleagues, expresses admiration for the Charleston Church shooting in his suicide note, and further says that he found the Columbine Shooters inspirational, and was influenced by the Virginia Tech shooter.

3. The Umpqua Community College shooter perhaps highlights the plausibility of this argument the most, since he directly referenced the Roanoke shooter in a blog post, stating:

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People like him have nothing left to live for. On an interesting note, I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are... A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.


With all of that said, what say you, people of PaRD? Do you think there is a relationship between media reporting and the frequency of mass shootings? If so, is the relationship significant? If it is significant, what should be done (if anything)?

Should there be legislation that prevents major news outlets from using the name/photo of mass shooters? If not laws, then perhaps guidelines for the media, like those involved with reporting on suicide?

Or should change be purely social and do we as consumers of media need to be conscientious of the kind of media we consume and demand media coverage of mass shootings that doesn’t make the shooters famous? That begs the question though: How do you currently fit into this equation? When talking about mass shootings in your personal lives and on your social media, do you share the shooter’s name and photo?
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Jun 15 2016 06:54am
Too long. might read later.
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Jun 15 2016 07:03am
Perhaps I am in the minority but I'm always surprised with how few mass shootings there are.

With as many people, guns, and general shittiness there are in this country and the world around us I would expect way more mass violence than there is.

There were plenty of people out there killing in large numbers before tvs and the 24 hour news cycle.

I'm pretty burnt out on bans/laws talk every time something tragic happens and I don't think regulating how the news is delivered is going to stop crazy any more than gun grabbing and walls/bans would
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Jun 15 2016 07:08am
very much falls into the tl;dr category especially with so many quotes and statistics thrown in
having said that, i did read your words and scanned over some of the rest

the potential self-profiling (ie 15 minutes of fame) effect committing a 'memorable' act has been raised quite often before and it has been proposed not to release the names of those to avoid glorification (and thereby reduce potential copying)
unfortunately the media are hungry to sensationalise everything and some exploit the 'any media coverage is good' principle, as exemplified by pictures of beheadings by terrorist groups but also the ongoing american election campaign

but specific to mass shootings, the media reporting also emphasises how easy it is to obtain the necessary 'tools'
there are a lot more comments which could be made but let this be it for the moment
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Jun 15 2016 10:58am
Why do you hate freedom so much? Merka. :(
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Jun 15 2016 11:03am
I've made a similar argument before, regarding how the media plasters the name and face of the perpetrators all over the 24-hour news cycle. This leads to other potential killers seeing a way to go out "in a blaze of glory", so to speak, and the cycle continues. I have to hand it to Anderson Cooper...he did a 2-hour special on the Orlando attack, and didn't use the killer's name, or show his face, a single time. Kudos to him for taking a principled stand.
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Jun 15 2016 11:06am
Quote (Surfpunk @ Jun 15 2016 12:03pm)
I've made a similar argument before, regarding how the media plasters the name and face of the perpetrators all over the 24-hour news cycle. This leads to other potential killers seeing a way to go out "in a blaze of glory", so to speak, and the cycle continues. I have to hand it to Anderson Cooper...he did a 2-hour special on the Orlando attack, and didn't use the killer's name, or show his face, a single time. Kudos to him for taking a principled stand.


I was watching news coverage on CNN yesterday and it constantly showed different pictures of the shooter... I just don't understand it. I'm not surprised Anderson did that, he's a solid news host.

I'll read the actual thread later... Geez.
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Jun 15 2016 11:06am
Quote (Surfpunk @ 15 Jun 2016 09:03)
I've made a similar argument before, regarding how the media plasters the name and face of the perpetrators all over the 24-hour news cycle. This leads to other potential killers seeing a way to go out "in a blaze of glory", so to speak, and the cycle continues. I have to hand it to Anderson Cooper...he did a 2-hour special on the Orlando attack, and didn't use the killer's name, or show his face, a single time. Kudos to him for taking a principled stand.


That's fucking fantastic. I love that dude.

The problem is that there's literally no way that this could ever be enforced, and we've got 'media outlets' whose entire job is making up bullshit stories in order to outrage people (i.e. National Report or Daily Currant) and so there's definitely going to be some places that are going to leap at the chance to put up shrines to the latest mass shooter coz they'll have an 'exclusive scoop' or w/e.

It's a lovely idea tho, and I'm always heartened when someone like Cooper is classy enough to pay heed.
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Jun 15 2016 11:09am
Quote (AiNedeSpelCzech @ Jun 15 2016 12:06pm)
That's fucking fantastic. I love that dude.

The problem is that there's literally no way that this could ever be enforced, and we've got 'media outlets' whose entire job is making up bullshit stories in order to outrage people (i.e. National Report or Daily Currant) and so there's definitely going to be some places that are going to leap at the chance to put up shrines to the latest mass shooter coz they'll have an 'exclusive scoop' or w/e.

It's a lovely idea tho, and I'm always heartened when someone like Cooper is classy enough to pay heed.


Integrity over ratings is an interesting concept. ^_^
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Jun 15 2016 11:10am
Quote (IceMage @ 15 Jun 2016 09:09)
Integrity over ratings is an interesting concept. ^_^


What's gone wrong with integrity in media today? The answer may shock you! *click to read more*
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