Maybe it wouldn't be as bad if the media didn't engage in an aggressive 24/7 bombardment compaign. I first noticed this when I was younger and the OJ Simpson thing happened - the news media broadcasted repeated footage of his SUV driving away from a zillion cop cars. We saw this during wartime, Saddam Hussein in 91. We saw this basically for the past 30 years at least via broadcast media and CNN. We see it during wars, but we also see it when media personalities are broadcast repeatedly due to a scandal or perhaps (like the useless Royal Family) due to some human interest thing. We see it on scary things -- the Murder Hornets have arrived. Avian flu is here. Etc. Is there a kernel of truth in some of those things? Sure. But my concern is the repetition and the cycling.
Now we see the mechanism at work in social media and online news media.
This is not new. It was called propaganda in WWI and WW2, and one tactic (this is discussed in Manufacturing Consent) is repetition. "Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”. Except we can add to the American news media, perhaps a new, Repeat an image and it becomes numbing.
Should we report on mass shootings, on racist actions and everything else. Sure. But ask yourself, are we doing a service or a disservice with a relentless bombardment compaign. Does this affect mental health? Is this useful, productive for society? Have you ever obsessed over anything? Is the media tapping into a frailty?
Thing that also immediately come to mind for me is films and games. Roger Ebert gave a scathing review of Fight Club[1] and I think he's spot on that it is essentially macho porn. Many films do the superficial thing where they attempt to renounce that any of the stuff is cool, but aesthetically they basically dwell in it.
One thing that has always impressed me was the Balance of Power losing screen that shows nothing but the message:
"You have ignited a(n accidental) nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure."[2]
I'm of two minds when it comes to this issue. I quite liked Fight Club precisely because in my younger years it was 'macho porn', but it left me with some thoughts that later on bloomed into understanding that the film is really criticising all of that.
I've had similar experiences with other works. Starship Troopers isn't quite the fascist power-fantasy that it appears to be on first sight. American Psycho can sorta be seen as a power fantasy, initially, but it's really about a pathetic guy struggling in his environment. And so on.
I don't feel it would do the world a service to criticize these (initially) ambiguous works because they're not spelling out the message they contain. And so while I often liked Ebert's reviews, I felt he was judging Fight Club in precisely the superficial way that doesn't do it justice. I imagine he might review 'Lolita' as a work glorifying adults loving prepubescent girls, when clearly the book isn't really doing anything quite like that.
Err, I suppose the counterpoint in my 'two minds' perspective is that I do get that there are cases where it does feel like the 'criticism' is a flimsy excuse to revel in its opposite. I don't think that applies to Fight Club, but it's an edge case. Better examples would be shows like Breaking Bad. I enjoyed that show a ton, but I could not find a proper excuse to watch it other than 'crime porn'. Any 'message' it tried to convey was clear from the first season. We all kept watching because we loved to see how bad Walter White could get.
It's easy to blame the media. But they do these things because we demand it. If they don't show it, we'll flip to the channel that does. The problem is all of us. It's our culture, and partly our human nature.
In hindsight of what has happened in the past 40 years, I wonder if we wouldn’t be better off without video-based mass media. It seems better discussion can happen without the distraction. (this is esp. true for those of us who have lived in a media whirlwind and seen the blatant and lazy manipulation of facts)
From who? Media outlets aren't stationed and positioned in war zones, nor are they the people who generally keep war an honest practice. When I was in Afghanistan they'd usually visit for a bit, get some footage and leave. Usually it's civilians and service members, occasionally the military's own documentation of war that would expose "war crimes".
I don't know, you know all the bodies who report wars? (hint: in the world outside the US). Does it exist such a thing as realistic or even gruesome war footage? Yes?
I had a pretty good view of Afghanistan and if you accept Afghanistan as the most modern interpretation of "war" then yes. I traveled mostly across Helmand and Nimroz, which were apart from some isolated mountainous regions, the most kinetic places in the country.
> Does it exist such a thing as realistic or even gruesome war footage
I don't know 100% what this means, it's phrased oddly so I'll do my best to answer it. Most war footage is gruesome, and much of it is captured by service members themselves. Next up would probably be the military's own "combat camera" which documents warzones from the front lines. For instance, this movie was a unit adjacent to mine: http://combatobscura.oscilloscope.net/ and was composed entirely of combat camera footage. Citizens documenting stuff is probably next, though I'd say it's value drops because it leaves out a lot of troop communication to know what was happening at the time. Most of the time when you see it, it's probably the kind of footage that is meant to frighten people at home because it's all post-action and carries very little explanation of what's going on at the time.
True, but humans prior made heroic effort to help those in need. E.g. British oppression resulted in the Irish potato famine. Letters and written communication describing the desolation inspired millions around the world to help.
There is an idea I've been playing with for years that I think would be useful in this sort of situation, though sadly I think its a bit too clever to get traction amongst not-nerds.
In the webcomic Digger[1], one of the main characters is an exiled hyena. I'm a bit lazy right now to go digging through the archive for the exact panels that explain the situation[2], but there's a twist on just plain exile. The character's name was "eaten". This is expanded on a bit more in the comic if you're in the mood for an archive binge, but the key phrases are, "Name eaten, gone. It an it now, not a real person," "Of course it remembers [its name]. It remembers the rabbit it ate yesterday too, but rabbit still gone. Memory not life. Name eaten, dead, gone".
Someone who goes and massacres a church, school, theater, grocery store, in doing so has renounced their humanity. AFAICT, across all cultures in history, there's a fairly consistent group of things that are Shit What You Just Don't Fucking Do, and massacring a defenseless group of your fellows seems to fall under that heading. So you want to go shoot up a bunch of people? Okay, your name is eaten. May you die an unknown forgotten unperson, instead of the immortality the news grants to such killers now.
Like i said. I think it's a bit too clever to really catch on. But I do wish the news would stop granting a sort of immortality to people who commit such horrific acts.
This has been done since at least ancient history, and is referred to as Damnatio Memoriae[1]
> Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. There are and have been many routes to damnatio memoriae, including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history. The term can be applied to other instances of official scrubbing; the practice is seen as long ago as the aftermath of the reign of the Egyptian Pharaohs Akhenaten in the 13th century BC, and Hatshepsut in the 14th century BC.
I can't say I particularly agree with the practice though.
Interesting. I can't say I'm terribly surprised there's an official word for it or that it was a historical practice. Reading Digger, it is quickly clear the author drew on a wide variety of sources and inspiration. I'd not be surprised if Damnatio Memoriae was a conscious inspiration.
It's more than just refusing to name the assailant. It's the notion that in renouncing their humanity with such a horrific act, they are now bereft of a name. The assailant has already declared to the world that they aren't a real person anymore, but an it. So consider its name to be gone and stop using said name.
Now that you say that, that points out why it probably shouldn't catch on. That attitude being taken seriously widespread could have some bad effects on the right to a fair trial. Fundamental rights should not be toyed with lightly. Even people who commit such a horrible act still have that fundamental right, because if they don't, that sets the precedent for myself or any other person to not have the right to a fair trial because of an accusation of a crime-too-horrible.
I still hate the immortality CNN bestows to mass shooters.
Perhaps one day we'll not publish the names of assailants of these kinds of crimes, just as we don't publish the names of victims of certain other crimes.
I recall that NPR took some advice from psychologists who talked to mass shooters.
They made a point to not emphasize the shooters name, not go into detail about their manifesto or ideology. They tried to avoid sounds and videos of chaos. They didn't completely ignore those things, but they choose to limit them.
They did talk about victims, their names, stories of communities, stories about people helping each other after the event.
In short they emphasized things the shooters don't like to think about and deemphasized things shooters like.
It's not clear if it helps, but I sure liked the coverage.
I liken it to a young child that wouldn't have come up with the idea - of stealing candy - let's say, until someone tells them specifically not to steal any candy - i.e. it expands their field of what's possible. Then it's their notion of morality (right vs. wrong) that dissuades them.
The Philippines has more mass shootings, and way more crime in general.
And how do you define a mass shooting? The media equates a gangland battle between two groups of crack dealers to be the same thing as the Columbine shooting.
A country can still have nightmarish levels of crime while having strict gun control, like Brazil. A country can have nightmarish levels of crime with very little gun restrictions, like South Africa and The Philippines. A country can be very safe and have little gun control, like Switzerland, The Czech Republic and Israel. A country can have strict gun control and very little crime, like Japan.
You need to take a more holistic approach to understand what is really going on. And certainly to inform policy.
I am really surprised people have not buried your comment. It is too reasonable and well thought out for certain divisive political crowds.
I really wish the US would focus on an infrastructure bill already. In my opinion that would do more to tackle the root of crime -- inequity than the current push being called for. I feel something like that over time would have a much more positive impact on the lives of more Americans than anything else discussed in recent memory. And it is not so divisive as other big govt ideas.
No, the Philippines don’t have more mass shootings than the US. Not even close. People seem to define “mass shooting” quite differently but no, your unsourced claim the Philippines isn’t the leader.
Per your own source, it depends on how you define a mass shooting. Lankford used an incredibly restrictive definition to get a result that portrayed the US in a negative light and generated a lot of media attention:
> Using the four-person-killed definition, Lankford found that the United States had far more mass shooters (90 shooters in the 46 years, or 31 percent of the total) than the other countries, which averaged 1.7 public mass shooter per country. His research excluded gang-related shootings, drive-by shootings, hostage-taking incidents, robberies and acts of genocide or terrorism.
Under Lott's broader definition, the Phillipines had significantly more mass shootings than the US per capita.
Unrestricted access to toothbrushes doesn’t result in amazing dental hygiene across the country. Mass shootings are a mental health issue. If we were to go to the extreme and outlaw all guns, people with severe mental illness who wanted to kill a bunch of people could either buy a gun illegally, or use a knife, a homemade pipe bomb, a vehicle, or a myriad of other ways to kill a lot of people.
Maybe we should be looking at the data for guns instead of toothbrushes since we already have it? "There are more public mass shootings in America than in any other country in the world."
is buying a gun legally and shooting youself/people with it *as easy as* "buying a gun illegally, or use a knife, a homemade pipe bomb, a vehicle"?
Mass stabbing? Not a thing. Suicice with a knife? Any idiot knows that it'll be much more painful than a bullet in the head, so they'd think (more than) twice a about that, as opposed to a gun, just pull the trigger and be done with it.
How did you even type that comment with a straight face?
That was a lazy response, but my point was you don't need access to gun to commit mass killings. You claimed that nobody would commit a mass killing with anything but a gun. I provided you with an example of where you were wrong.
> You claimed that nobody would commit a mass killing with anything but a gun
Phrasing it like that is a bit disingenuous. The only thing I said was mass stabbing was not a thing, which was wrong I guess. You don't have to read it so literally.
The point is gun is one of, if not the most effective vehicle for mass killing.
I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make by saying you can kill a lot of people with other things too. Yes but it's not as easy as killing with a gun that's why those things have not happened to the same degree.
thanks for completely ignore the point, "it happens" is very different than it being a pandemic level occurence like in the US. Obviously the harm one can inflict with a blade is much less than that of gun, unless you are batman.
> Regardless, you bet it would decrease the death count.
Absolutely not. Guns "democratize" violence. People who are less strong will at least have a fighting chance to defend themselves. Without guns, those with brute force have all the power. It would be especially bad for women.
When we have a country where everyone gets along and trusts the police and government, then we can have a discussion about banning guns. I still won't support it but at least you have some justification for considering gun control.
what does "democratizing" have anything to do with death count? I guess you are saying maybe less women die? If they do carry guns that is? Do they?
Point is overall number, men or women, will be lower, unless you think that with the same number of violent incidents, the chance of fatal injuries with and without guns are exactly the same.
The rifle deaths in the US are superb. 300 per year via FBI statistics in a country of 320 million. Thats practically a number we should be celebrating. For comparison theres about 1500 homicides by knife per year.
If you want to live in a free society every once in a while some shit is going to go down.
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the entire national discussion has been over banning the AR15. Have you been living under a rock?
No kidding, most homicides are committed with hand guns in liberal cities from gang violence where they have already completely banned guns. I dont think people are stupid but I do think you are. And quite triggered, clearly.
I am not sure they should. It is something people want to know about. It is their duty to report about important to know events in the real world, and the fact that there exist scumbags that are willing to murder random people is definitely an important fact that we all need to be aware of.
And yet they have specific policies[1][2][3], industry-wide and largely self adopted, for suicide coverage.
How is this any different? Many of these individuals straight send out manifestos. And the media contorts statistics, which happen to not only include suicides but suicides are the majority of the statistics, to support a specific narrative violence is more prevalent and commonplace than it is..
On the other hand, the media compulsively portrays the sensationalist as commonplace and the commonplace as rare. They are presenting an increasingly skewed version of reality.
Now we see the mechanism at work in social media and online news media.
This is not new. It was called propaganda in WWI and WW2, and one tactic (this is discussed in Manufacturing Consent) is repetition. "Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”. Except we can add to the American news media, perhaps a new, Repeat an image and it becomes numbing.
Should we report on mass shootings, on racist actions and everything else. Sure. But ask yourself, are we doing a service or a disservice with a relentless bombardment compaign. Does this affect mental health? Is this useful, productive for society? Have you ever obsessed over anything? Is the media tapping into a frailty?