Here’s a dirty little secret: The media loves school shootings. It’s part of a bigger dirty secret: The media loves mayhem and tragedy of all sorts, because those things bring eyeballs to the page or screen.
Why do we have Trump as president? Because the media wanted him. If they didn’t want him, they wouldn’t have given him $2 billion in free airtime. He’s a vile intestinal parasite for whom death is too good at this point, but he’s right about one thing: The media can’t quit him.
The same is true of school shootings. Granted, we don’t hear about most of them anymore (there’s been one per day so far this year, but this is the first one to make major news) because only the ones with high kill tallies break through the dross. Just look at yesterday and today’s saturation coverage of this Florida shooting — live helicopter footage, constant death-toll updates. For the media, this was a day of excitement and high ratings. Today the news is full of stories about the shooter’s strategy for boosting his body count, a handy how-to for the next killer. They. Love. This.
And let’s not overlook today’s garment-rending reactions, which are just as much a part of this Kabuki cycle as conservative politicians’ useless prayers (there is no evidence that any of them has ever had an actual “thought” as we understand the term). Why do they bother? They can roll out exactly what they said at the last shooting, and the one before that, etc. ad nauseum.
They bother because getting people emotionally worked up is what the media is all about. People feel a lot more than they think, and the media prizes emotion because emotions are easier to manipulate, and manipulating its viewers is what TV is all about, the better to soften you up for the advertising.
There is nothing to be done about this country’s gun violence. Nothing. It will never end, not in the lifetimes of Baby Boomers at least, because the country is populated by hundreds of millions of not-very-bright people, and they elect not-very-bright people to represent them. You can’t reason with them; the exercise of intellect is beyond them. That idiot from Louisiana, Steve Scalise, was nearly killed by a crazed gunman and he still embraces our gun culture wholeheartedly.
With all that, why blame the media? Because they could operate differently. During sporting events, particularly football, drunken fans occasionally run out on the field and have to be chased and corralled by security guards. The networkds used to show these diversions on-screen until somebody figured out that THIS WAS ONLY ENCOURAGING THE BEHAVIOR. They stopped showing the chase scenes, and while the stupidy hasn’t stopped, it’s nowhere near as frequent as it was when the bad behavior was televised.
The news media is entirely capable of reporting this without sensationalizing it. They just don’t think safe schools are as important as uninterrupted football games.