There was another school shooting on Aug. 27 in what has become a darkly familiar pattern. Two young children in Minneapolis were killed, and another 18 people were injured.
By later that night, coverage had begun to dwindle in a way that indicates our attention span — or patience — for enduring these far-too-frequent tragedies appears to be shrinking. The horror persists, but the novelty is fading, fueled by a sense of numbness, or perhaps a desire, faced with an inability to change or adequately address the situation, to simply tune it out.
Within days, “Minneapolis” became another city synonymous with horror, and already appeared to be slipping into the hazy realm of memory.
If the duration of media interest is shrinking in terms of the coverage window after yet another horrific event, that’s attributable to a variety of factors. One stems from the frenzied Trump news cycle, which quickly sandwiched cable-news coverage of the shootings between the purge at the CDC, the president’s efforts to oust Federal Reserve Board governor Lisa Cook and more fresh outrages.
The idea of devoting less time to mass shootings remains a much-debated topic, raising complicated questions about the media’s conflicted history of covering such killers. Specifically, at least some research has fueled the pretty persuasive argument that giving manifesto-spouting killers attention only risks leading to another “Minneapolis” in the future.
Chatter about what happened last week did persist over the next several days, but much of it shifted to political point scoring, from MAGA voices turning the event into an anti-trans screed to liberals reiterating it’s time for action on guns, provoking additional ire by suggesting that just sending “thoughts and prayers” to victims isn’t enough.
MSNBC anchors Jen Psaki and Michael Steele weighed in on that score, stating that they were tired of empty rhetoric offering solace to victims without doing anything to prevent future killings.
“Prayer does not bring these kids back,” Psaki tweeted, later struggling to hold back tears on her show while discussing the story. “Enough with the thoughts and prayers.”
Predictably, that provoked a rebuke from the White House — Republicans seldom miss an opportunity to brand Democrats as godless — and when a voice from an unexpected quadrant, Fox News commentator and former GOP congressman Trey Gowdy, raised a similar point about disturbed people having access to guns, he was quickly shouted down by those who would otherwise be ideological allies.
While it’s hard to quantify the precise level of coverage, a 2018 study by Media Matters for America reviewed New York Times front pages immediately after 10 mass shootings following Columbine in 1999, and concluded, “Most of the shootings carried the front page for six days, including the Sunday edition. Cable-news coverage — which tends to cycle through news even faster — charts a similar course.”
The issue of covering mass shootings in general — and school shootings in particular — has long represented a problematic and ethically thorny area for media. Part of that has to do with the fact irrational killers crave attention, spurring debate over the extent to which their names and manifestos should be amplified.
That line of thinking prompted the creation of an advocacy group, No Notoriety, challenging the media not to name or show the likeness of killers to deprive “violent like-minded individuals the media celebrity and media spotlight they so crave,” as its website states.
Such attention has also raised concerns about copycats, and what’s known as the contagion effect. A decade ago, one study indicated that a mass shooting and the coverage it elicits increases the likelihood another will occur within the next two weeks. Those findings, however, were by no means conclusive, and reflect the clash between what the public has the right to know — indeed, needs to know — and potential harm associated with turning mass killers into celebrities, however fleeting.
Still, the debate did spark soul-searching by the media. As NPR reported in 2019, worried about encouraging copycats, “many outlets have chosen to devote less coverage to perpetrators and more to victims and to the laws and policies that have not prevented these tragedies.”
Then there’s the sheer volume to contend with. After the devastating Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, a Washington Post headline captured the exhaustion and fatigue associated with such stories, stating, “There are too many mass shootings for the U.S. media to cover.” Some, such as former Obama administration official Jeh Johnson, advocated showing graphic images of the dead bodies, hoping to shock America out of its lethargy.
Politically speaking, the default positions in response to mass shootings have become all too clear, as has the absence of anything that might tackle the issue from a policy perspective.
Democrats might cite the need for gun control, but they lack the political leverage to force Republicans to deviate from their strategy of wrapping themselves in the Second Amendment.
At the same time, the MAGA movement has proven adept at shifting the conversation by aligning the shooters with Democrats, despite the long history of pathetic loners — as the Washington Post reported, overwhelmingly men — often animated by confused political orientations and some form of mental illness.
Although she used the occasion to bash Democrats, podcaster Megyn Kelly addressed the fruitlessness of waiting for a policy solution plainly enough on her show, saying, “We had 20 dead first graders at Sandy Hook, nothing changed. If you don’t change after 20 dead first graders, you don’t change.”
Whatever its flaws and excesses, cable news has its finger on the pulse of its viewers. In the case of conservative outlets, that means playing up shootings primarily when they can be used to gain some advantage against liberals. As for mainstream or liberal networks, when it comes to discussing policy-based remedies, years of political impotence have taken their toll.
Focusing on the shooter is ethically dicey. Talking about victims is appropriate, but terribly depressing. And turning to next steps, at this point, feels like a waste of time.
Given all that, it only makes sense that media would cover these stories less once the initial situation is resolved. And if the past is any guide, the tragic history of the 21st century is networks that might have mishandled the latest mass shooting will have another chance, soon, to correct those errors.