If It Bleeds It Leads: How the American Media Perpetuates and Profits from Mass Shootings

Op-Ed by Brian Miller

“I have repeatedly told CNN and our other media the following if you don’t want to propagate more mass murders: Don’t start the story with sirens blaring.
Don’t have photos of the killer. Don’t make it 24/7 coverage. Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story. Localize the story to the affected community. And make it as boring as possible in every other market.”– Dr. Park Dietz, Forensic Psychologist, on how to stop mass shootings

Video games. 4chan. “Toxic masculinity.” These are just a few of the media’s favorite folk devils when it comes to assigning blame for mass shootings in America. However, there is startling evidence that how the media covers these tragedies makes them culpable in perpetuating future ones.

This might sound like an outlandish claim, but it’s supported by evidence from no less an authority than the National Institutes of Health. It’s related to a well-established phenomenon of copycat suicides known as the Werther Effect. Other countries’ medias have taken steps to minimize the Werther Effect through self-imposed industry standards on suicide reporting, and many of these standards have parallels with the coverage of mass shootings.
 
The American media currently has no industry standard practices for how to cover either suicides or mass shootings. However, one can easily see the difference between how mass shootings and suicides are covered. Whereas suicides are treated as sombre tragedies, mass shootings often have the sensationalism turned up to 11. There’s a detailed discussion of the shooter’s life story, motives and methods. Strong evidence suggests that this both encourages and instructs potential mass shooters.

Statistically speaking, mass shootings represent a tiny portion of all deaths in the United States. For example, 2017 was the deadliest year for mass shootings in America with a total of 117 people killed. For context, 102 people die from automobile accidents every day according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Institute.

Despite the low frequency of these tragedies, the media pays outsized attention to them for self-serving reasons, which are both political and economic: There’s a demonstrated anti-gun agenda amongst America’s media. And there’s the ongoing shift in the media’s business model to attention-based revenue that results in ever-more sensational news coverage and “clickbait” headlines.

The lurid attention to mass shootings is profitable for America’s press, cable news networks, and social media companies – despite the consequences encapsulated by the Werther Effect. Thus a look at the role the American media plays in perpetuating these rampage killers is in order.

What Is the Werther Effect?

Ask yourself: Can suicides be contagious? Some studies say yes. It’s known clinically as the Werther Effect, after Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. This is a particularly important topic in the era of the so-called “mass shooter” and the phenomenon of “suicide by cop.” Researchers at Northeastern Illinois University and Arizona State University found that as many as 20 to 30 percent of all mass shootings are copycat shootings inspired by media coverage of other shootings.

The history of the Werther Effect is quite curious. Goethe’s novel was a cultural phenomenon at the time. Melancholic men were dressing in blue jackets and yellow pants in emulation of the novel’s protagonist, Werther, who was effectively a stand-in for Goethe himself. Some men took their love of the novel one step further by committing suicide with a pistol in the same manner as Werther, who ends his life at the end of the novel after being rejected by the woman he loves. This led to the book being banned in several places.

The term “Werther Effect” was first coined by researcher David Phillips in 1974. Further studies in 1985 and 1989 by Phillips and his team found that suicide rates, as well as other accidents, increased after a well-publicized suicide. The Werther Effect impacts the young and the elderly – but not the middle-aged. Those who commit copycat suicides tend to be of a similar age to the original suicide they are copying.

How Do Copycat Suicides Work?

 

The timeline for a copycat suicide is generally weeks and months, though in the case of a high-profile celebrity suicide, it might be as long as one year. Some of the most famous suicides that have caused a spike in the overall suicide rate include Marilyn Monroe (that August had about 200 suicides more than was typical for the month) and the Tunisians street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation kicked off the Arab Spring. The Netflix series 13 Reasons Why saw a 26-percent increase in searches for “how to commit suicide,” an 18-percent increase in searches for “commit suicide” and a 9-percent increase in searches for “how to kill yourself.” The teen suicide rate itself spiked after the release of the show.

The Werther Effect for mass shootings was found to be 13 weeks by the study conducted by Arizona State University and Northeastern Illinois University.

For his part, Phillips mostly blamed the media. He believed that people who were having a hard time felt that in some way they had been given “permission” to end their life by a high-profile suicide. He compared this with similar studies about other risk-taking behaviors such as taking drugs. People were more likely to engage in such activities if someone else had done so first.

In the case of a mass shooting, potential shooters are not just given a sick kind of “permission,” they are also given a script from which to follow – a ready-made game plan that they can copy and tweak to best fit their purposes. The shooter in El Paso, Texas directly referenced the manifesto of the Christchurch mosque shooter, for example.

Suicides due to the Werther Effect, in addition to being similar with regard to age group, were also similar with regard to method. This is important to remember when considering those mass shootings which are, in effect, a highly dramatic form of suicide. Some shooters seek to get out alive. But for many, the intended effect is being killed by police in the act of shooting other people.

Curiously, the Werther Effect is not an inevitability, but is largely a function of how the media reports on the suicide in question. For example, there were fears that the suicide of Kurt Cobain would lead to a rash of suicides. However, in the media coverage of Cobain’s death, the focus was primarily on the need for mental health care and the suffering of his family due to his suicide. The result was that there was actually a decrease in the suicide rate around the time of his death.

The Media’s Role in Creating the Werther Effect

The United States is anomalous when it comes to coverage of suicide, in that it has no national professional code on how suicides should be covered. Norway forbids publicizing suicide in any way in its media, while other countries have a much more moderate, but sensible, approach. For example, in the United Kingdom, journalistic practice is to not romanticize the death, use lurid photos, or use the word “suicide” anywhere in a headline.

Not only does the United States not have rules against celebrating or glamorizing suicide – either as an industry-standard journalistic practice or by government fiat – the United States media has a lurid fascination with suicide in general as well as suicide by cop and its close cousin the mass shooting.

There is an equally lurid motto for this principle in the American media: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Note the coverage in the New Zealand media of Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch mosque shooter. His face is blurred out in all media coverage. The government of New Zealand requested that other countries not show footage from the shooting, which was live streamed. While the jailing of no less than eight people who shared the shooters video is an extreme reaction that infringes upon freedom of speech and free exchange of ideas, it shows just how committed New Zealand was to prevent any glorification of the shooter.

The media does this for two reasons: First, it moves units. Newspapers and other media are businesses and do what creates the greatest profits. However, there is another, more sinister and cynical reason that can be credibly put forward: The American media has a left-wing political agenda that includes the wholesale banning and confiscation of private firearms.

Mass shootings are, in terms of sheer number of deaths, a blip on the radar. The euphemism “gun violence” is often used to mask this, which lumps murders and suicides into the same statistic. While suicides are undoubtedly tragic, they’re not what one thinks of when hearing the term “gun violence.” All told, there were 11,004 gun homicides in 2016. While this sounds like a lot, some context is in order: 34,436 died of car crashes in the United States in the same year.

Neil deGrasse Tyson came under fire for pointing this out – that not only do gun deaths not amount to a lot in the grand scheme of things, but “mass shootings” are even less.

Indeed, what counts as a “mass shooting” is a political game that deliberately excludes mass shootings. Vox, Mother Jones, The Washington Post and the Congressional Research Service all keep detailed records of mass shootings. Each of these deliberately exclude gang violence in their tallies.

For context, a total of 888 people have died in mass shootings since 1982. That’s a total of 1 percent of all gun deaths, approximately two-thirds of which are suicides. In 2017 alone, police killed 1,189. Americans should be concerned about mass shootings and any other topic where public policy might be able to reduce the number of deaths.

But Mark Manson and others have discussed how mass shootings are not only something virtually every American doesn’t have to worry about, but panicking and virally boosting the incidents might also be creating more of them (along the same lines as the Werther Effect). Sam Harris has discussed how new legislation is probably not the answer, but a different view of public social violence is.

It’s worth noting that, like terrorism, the intended effect of a mass shooting is attention and fear. When society reacts hysterically to mass shootings without proportion, it is playing into the hands of the agenda of the mass media as well as the intended shooter.

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