The Trace Shocked To Learn Media Focuses On Killers, Not Victims

By Tom Knighton

One of the potential driving factors in mass shootings may well be the desire to achieve fame. Killers find that racking up a high body count is a great way to achieve notoriety. After all, if you want your own Wikipedia entry, killing dozens of people is one way to get there.

But the anti-gun “news” site The Trace is shocked to find that the media spends inordinately more time focused on the killers than the victims of mass shootings.

When American newspapers cover school shootings, they run more photos of the perpetrators than the victims, a recent study published in the American Behavioral Scientist suggests.

Photos of perpetrators outnumber photos of each deceased victim by a ratio of 16 to 1, on average, according to an analysis of newspapers’ coverage of three school shootings in 2007, 2012 and 2015. Another key finding: Editors also are more likely to run larger images of the killers.

The study’s author, Nicole Smith Dahmen, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, examined 4,934 front-page photos from nine days of coverage following the shootings. She looked at the images that ran after the …Read the Rest

Source:: Bearing Arms