VA Journalist Shooting: Is The Media Responsible?

By Dean Weingarten

In the aftermath of the Roanoke live-TV shooting, before the bodies were buried, the old media was using the deaths to raise ratings and promote their political agenda. They piously failed to mention their own responsibility . . .

The “Copycat Effect” is a well known and researched phenomena. Endless promotion of these tragic events and the publicity given to the perpetrators is far more of a causal factor for mass murder than the Second Amendment-protected gun rights. We have known for decades that it is media attention that is the driving motivation for most of these public mass shooters.

The copycat effect has been demonstrated and documented over and over again. Clayton Cramer wrote a paper on this subject in 1993, published in a the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 9:1 [Winter 1993-94]. It won First Place, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Ethics Prize, 1993, Undergraduate Division.

It has been widely written about in other publications as well, such as the Wall Street Journal. In 2004, Loren Coleman wrote the The Copycat Effect. It detailed simple strategies for mitigating the effect and reducing the number of …read more

Source:: Truth About Guns