Some thoughts brought on by recent events. . .

I've long had mixed feelings about news media.

On the one hand, they are an essential part of society. They let people know what's going on over the horizon. They let us be more like part of a global community, rather than limiting our existence to a parochial point of view. They help us to make (somewhat) educated choices about what to do, where to do it, and how to do it. They can work to keep those who have power from abusing that power.

On the other hand, they can be amazingly arrogant thoughtless callous idiots. We seem to have passed out of the age of the Divine Right of Kings, and entered the age of the Divine Right of the Media. While claiming a populist mandate, they can wield enormous power and at times are not at all shy about using that power for their own selfish aims. The people telling us the news are often more the centerpiece of the shows than the news itself is.

As long as human beings are still the ones in charge of media, this isn't likely to change. Through all of human history, the same people who are informing the populace are at the same time putting their own spin on that information in an attempt to coerce and manipulate. Sometimes it may be for pure and noble motives, sometimes for less laudable motives, perhaps sometimes the person isn't even aware that he is doing it at all. But it's an inescapable part of human nature. Perhaps if we can get robots to monitor events and report on them this will change, but I wouldn't bet on it.

However, just because some of the negative aspects of news media are inescapable, that doesn't mean that all aspects are. The media can get into some very bad habits, and often these habits would be very easy to stop. There's no reason why the media has to do these negative things, they just do it. . .because they can, or because they don't really care, or because they just never bothered to wonder whether or not their actions might actually have consequences.

Ten days ago there was a shooting in Arizona. A Congresswoman and a bunch of other people were injured, six people died, and the shooter was arrested. Probably just about every person in the English-speaking world is aware of the basics of this event, because the news media has hardly spoken of anything else since. When there's a whole lot of brand new information related to the case, the media reports it. When there's only a tiny tidbit of news related to the case, the media reports it in three lines in an article, and then pads the rest of the article with a repeat of all the previous news on the shooting. When there's nothing new going on related to the case, then the media simply writes up reams of “analysis” of every single facet of the situation, or of interviews with the niece of the college roommate of the barber of a man who once voted for the Congresswoman, or just of media “personalities” sitting looking solemn and declaring how very sad it all is.

This reaction from the media is far from unusual. In 2007 a guy went on a shooting rampage on the Virginia Tech campus, killing a number of people and himself in the process. The media went wild. In 1999, two students did a similar thing at Columbine High School. The media had the same reaction.

Obviously, these sorts of events are news, and are worthy of being reported on. They're important to the communities in which they happened, they're important in how they influence society, they're important in showing us what's wrong so that we can work on fixing it.

Unfortunately, a large part of what is wrong is the way in which the media goes about reporting these types of events.

Mention the Arizona shooting, and most people have a sort of general idea of who the shooter was. They might be a bit vague on his name, but he is an actual person the them. He had motives, he has a personality. But what about the victims who were shot? Obviously the Congresswoman is well known, but then she already was beforehand. The rest? Well, there was some sort of a judge, and some people who worked for the Congresswoman, and. . .ummm. . .there was something about some little kid. . .and. . .errrr. . .ummm. . .

How about the Virginia Tech shooting? Lots of people still remember the name of the guy with the gun. Nobody beyond immediate friends or family ever knew the names of any of the other people, or anything about them. The same with the Columbine shooting, and really with most other such shootings.

The people doing these shootings are doing it for a reason: attention. They want the world to know about their grievances. They want everybody to know who they are and what their opinions are. And the media does everything it can to oblige these people.

When did “be a cheerleader for psychotic evil” become part of a reporter's job description?

(I'll let you all imagine Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Wolf Blitzer, Bill O'Reilly, Bryant Gumbel, Sir Alastair Burnet, and Jon Snow all dressed in miniskirts and midriff-baring tops, performing somersaults and forming a human pyramid. Then I'll let you take a few moments to regain your equilibrium.)

The Virginia Tech case is a particularly good (or bad, actually) example of this sort of thing. The news media just couldn't get enough of the guy who did the shootings. They splashed photos of him across all of their newspapers and websites. They dug up every bit of history about the guy's life that they could find, and published it. They tracked down every person who ever met the guy, or who ever met a guy who met the guy, and interviewed them. They got their tame psychologists to write up pages of psychoanalysis. They even went so far as to publish the guy's manifesto on a number of major news outlets.

Heck, with a free publicity department as dedicated and thorough and enthusiastic as that, why wouldn't any troubled attention-seeker go out and start killing random people? It's a dream come true for them. Probably the only thing keeping the US from being totally depopulated by angsty teens with guns is the fact that they'd actually have to get up off of their couches, put down their iPhones, and actively do things.

The news media wallows in this sort of stuff, practically worshiping these people as though they were some sort of dread chthonic demigods. Sure, the newscasters are always careful to talk about how horrible these people are, and how bad what they did is. . .and they talk about them, and they talk about them, and they talk about them, and they talk about them, and they talk about them.

What should the media report on instead? Well, report on the event. Tell what happened. But totally ignore the person who did it. Fine, tell us that he was arrested, or that he's dead, or that he was found guilty in the trial. But never mention his name. Don't show us his picture. Don't give a point-by-point analysis of the guy's high school essay on “Why the World Hates Me”. Don't link us to his FaceSpace page. Don't give us pop-psychology analyses of why he did it. We know why he did it: he's crazy. The fact that crazy people exist is not news and is not worthy of announcing to the world. The exact details of why he did what he did may be of value to mental health professionals and to psychology students, but the rest of the world doesn't need all the details. Nor do we need to know what the guy didn't like, where he grew up, or any of that. All of that stuff is only of value to one person: the crazy guy with the gun.

Instead of focusing the spotlight on the psycho, why not talk about the victims? If the media wants human interest, well, weren't the victims at least as human as the gunman (arguably, they're even more human). Why is it that it is so important to report to the world what the gunman's favourite brand of ketchup was, yet even the names of the people who were killed aren't worth mentioning?

Leave the criminals as nameless vague entities. Just refer to him as “some crazy idiot with a gun” or something like that, and dig no deeper into his story. Stop rewarding these people for their actions. Otherwise, what reason does some suicidal unbalanced guy have for not going out and murdering all of our kids? Suicide is often an ultimate act of attention seeking, and the news media seems to be doing all it can to make murder/suicide the most lucrative form of it. The media is giving the crazy people with guns an enormous incentive to commit the most atrocious atrocities that they can manage, and it's not as though the crazy people really see anything important to lose in the transaction.

Perhaps if they stop being rewarded for their efforts, then they'll not see the effort as worthwhile. And that might actually be more worthwhile than learning what videogame some crazy guy was playing the day before he went out and started shooting people.