How to get more than “routine media coverage” from your state’s mass shooting

by Spocko

This last year you might have been in community that has gone through a life changing experience–a mass shooting. Hopefully for you and most of your local media, it’s a once in a lifetime experience.

Your local media covered the story and you expected action to be taken by “The Powers That Be” so this doesn’t happen again.

Then you watched in stunned confusion as the national media, who have seen these tragedies many times before, marked it as routine. National politicians called it routine. Your story is just part of a larger trend.

Of course you believe your story deserves more than “routine media coverage.” How can the media be numb to your story? Aren’t they human beings? Don’t they feel the need to do something different this time ? Isn’t that their job? No. It’s yours.

There’s a problem – But it’s not the media’s problem
The media are stuck in a format they are afraid to break. Because breaking it gets them in trouble. So they lament the problem, but let the public know they can’t do anything about it. That’s what Bill Goodykoontz of the The Arizona Republic did in his column for USA Today. “Shooting coverage is routine, and that’s the story.

Something has to give. We can’t give up on outrage and heartbreak. Not as media, and not as a society. A story like today’s still has to shock us. It still has to move us.

Russell Frank of Newsweek, reviewed how other media outlets covered the story with Numbing Routine of Responding to Mass Killings“

The coverage has begun to seem generated, as if one could simply key in the facts of a specific case and a software application could spit out the stories without human agency. Far from helping matters, the stories reinforce the sense that we are stuck in a cycle from which there is no escape.

Frank’s comment about agency was telling. He pointed at others to do something differently, but he didn’t, it would get him in trouble.

Others analyzed it, like James Warren did for The Poynter Institute in his piece Mass murder and the media routine. He quoted Danny Hayes, a George Washington University political scientist who’s studied the media and mass shootings.

“There will be calls for gun control, just as there were after the August on-air killing of two journalists in Virginia. And the media will focus on the issue for a few days. But unless political leaders, perhaps spurred by gun control advocates, decide to make a concerted push for policy change, the issue will probably fade from view pretty quickly. It almost always does.”