Make a list of all the ways anyone thinks we can reduce mass murders. It will run from less violence in entertainment to more mental health services, and cover the irreconcilable spectrum from “fewer guns in society” to “more guns.”
But the potential (if only partial) solution that’s getting more attention now with each successive mass murder is something that only the news media can implement: stop paying attention to the murderer. Don’t examine his background, don’t publicize his motives, don’t even mention his name.
This sentiment has grown so strong that the sheriff whose officers responded last week to the Oregon shooting said afterward, “Let me be very clear: I will not name the shooter.” He appealed to the media to act the same way, to avoid “any glorification and sensationalization of him.” As a related analysis in The Denver Post put it on Sunday, law enforcement officials hope that such a stance “will reduce the chance of (mass murderers’) notoriety and keep their actions from inspiring others.”
Maybe. With the Oregon mass murderer, evidence supports it. The New York Times cited “a string of online postings that showed he had become increasingly interested in other high-profile shootings,” and quotes a recent entry: “Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.”
But as the Post analysis also said, investigators sometimes use what they learn in news reports about these mass murders to better understand the signals that someone might have missed and, hopefully, better comprehend what it will take to prevent more massacres down the road.
I want to add another argument — at risk of supporting an increasingly unpopular policy — why the news media should not suppress anything it uncovers about the villains who perpetrate these massacres (while also reporting on the innocent victims of their violence).
The argument is simple: we already make countless subjective but unavoidable decisions about the news you get. They are decisions without which the pages of this newspaper would be empty. They run from what stories to cover to where to place them in the newspaper or broadcast; from who to interview to what questions to ask to which parts of each interview to use in the story; from what to say at the top of the piece to how to end it; from what to include among the facts to be reported, to what to leave out.
Do you really want us to also make decisions about what to report and what to ignore, based on our perceptions of your morality, your politics, or in this case, your security? If a journalist thinks abortions are a moral malignancy, would you really want him or her to curtail coverage of the controversial topic? If a political reporter concludes that Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy is a travesty, do you really think he or she ought to stop reporting on it?
Which brings us back to mass murders. Will you be satisfied if someone like me, or another journalist out in the field or back in the newsroom, makes a godlike decision that society will be safer if we don’t report on certain aspects of the crime? A letter-writer to The Post over the weekend said yes, writing, “… maybe somewhere down the line someone won’t follow through on their evil plans because they don’t think it will bring them the notoriety they crave.”
Maybe, or maybe not. But it can become an awfully slippery slope.
Over the weekend, The Denver Post asked this question in an online poll: “Should the news media refrain from using the names of shooters when reporting on mass shootings such as Thursday’s attack in Roseburg, Ore.?” Although not a scientific survey, the sentiment was clear: nearly 70 percent said yes.
The citizen part of me agrees. The journalist part is still not so sure.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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