Parents and alumni at Columbine High School planned to form a “human chain” around the school this week to keep the media away from the students. Large majorities of those polled by NEWSWEEK say they believe media coverage encourages copycat killings (88 percent) and makes people feel more endangered than they really are (72 percent). There’ve been other charges: all-mayhem-all-the-time desensitizes us to violence. It intrudes on private moments. It gives dysfunctional losers an opportunity to go out in a blaze of glory, and facilitated Buford Furrow Jr.’s horrific “wake-up call.” It almost feels as if the infotainment empire is producing these shootings, providing a stage for the psychos to walk onto as if making an appearance on “The Jenny Jones Show.”
To journalists, the complaints are troubling but double-edged. “They reward us by watching,” laments Fox News vice president John Moody, “then complain about what they see.” And, media types say, they are ever-vigilant about practicing restraint. CNN says it made sure not to show the children’s faces as they left the building hand in hand last week. The Chicago Sun-Times played the Columbine shootings inside the paper the next day, saying it wanted to protect young children and prevent copycat crimes. Last spring, local TV stations in Los Angeles were properly contrite when they cut away from regular programming (one from “Animaniacs”) to cover a police pursuit, only to have the suspect shoot himself in the head on camera. Some news outlets have begun using a several-second delay on “live” coverage so they can pull the plug.
But rigid, across-the-board guidelines aren’t going to happen, executives say. Neither is walking away from these stories. “You can just whitewash it, or try to minimize the terrible things that are going on,” says Jeff Wald, news director of KTLA-TV in Los Angeles. “[But] the public has to know about these things. They’re newsworthy… this is the unfortunate reality going on in the country right now.”
News outlets also tend to blame other news outlets. The print people blame the TV people; the network news people blame the cable people. And indeed, news consumers in the 1990s need to recognize that there’s no media monolith out there. Everybody’s product is different. Sure, 24-hour cable-news channels get mind-numbingly repetitive, but their audiences are tiny: fewer than a million homes normally tune in to the three services. Ratings for last week’s shooting spiked to 2.5 million (compared with the 12.3 million that viewed the post-Littleton “20/20” episode). That’s still out of nearly 100 million TV households. They’re niches for news junkies. So common sense applies: punch the remote, monitor the kids. Or go elsewhere: when everybody was complaining about John Kennedy Jr. overkill, The New York Times never once gave the story the lead position on its front page, subordinating it to tax cuts and Israel. But no, the tabloids and local TV stations, duking it out in the ratings and on the newsstands, won’t renounce their mantra, “If it bleeds, it leads.” And sells.
The big three networks, by contrast, do little live coverage, and they aired fewer crime stories last year than in any year since 1990, according to consultant Andrew Tyndall. But they’re especially starved for big, sweeping news events. Like the news magazines, they’ve cut back on certain plain-vanilla stories in favor of more news-you-can-use about health, education, religion, entertainment. But they still retain their chops for get-me-rewrite news, and their infrastructures of reporters around the world. So when a big story breaks, they swarm all over it. The news magazines particularly like it if a story is imbued with the Zeitgeist, a little bit of everything. And these days, you can add one more element–perched ravenously on a dead tree, perhaps. The media are part of the story, too.
