Hours after the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, Zeynep Tufekci spent part of her evening calling out major media that aired video of students trembling while the noise of gunshots ruptured the air. “This is a snuff film,” she said of one such clip, which was embedded atop a New York Times story. The video’s headline: “Filming a Rampage: Students Capture Florida School Attack.”
News consumers are accustomed to seeing such harrowing footage. Tufekci, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina who researches technology and society, maintains they shouldn’t be. Backed by a growing body of scholarship that mass killers inspire imitators, she wants the media to restrain themselves in how much visceral evidence they broadcast of a shooter’s deeds. “This doesn’t mean censoring the news or not reporting important events of obvious news value,” she wrote in the Times in 2015. “It means not providing the killers with the infamy they seek.”
Tufekci’s argument concerns a “contagion” effect. As researchers at Arizona State University wrote in 2015, “mass killings involving firearms are incented by similar events in the immediate past.” They found that school shootings become more likely in the 13 days following a previous one. The fear is that media exposure helps fuel such “copycat” acts. While the ASU researchers’ conclusion didn’t go that far—it determined only that contagion exists—physicist Sherry Towers, who led the study, admitted, “it appears that yes, national media coverage does end up increasing the frequency of these tragedies.”
Advocates have used similar findings to lobby the press for years. One such campaign, “Don’t Name Them,” began in 2010 with the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. It is a joint effort with the FBI and the “I Love U Guys” Foundation, created by John-Michael and Ellen Keyes, parents of Emily Keyes, who was killed in a 2006 Colorado school shooting. “Our efforts are in acknowledging that notoriety is often one of the desired goals of some of these perpetrators,” John-Michael says. “And if we can reduce that, it’s just one small piece that makes them pause before they go.”
The campaign’s recommendations aim for the balance in coverage that Tufekci encourages: “Sociologists and criminologists should study the criminal—but let’s not glorify the shooter by giving him valuable airtime,” its website reads.
The good sense of this suggestion aside, is it practicable? A cynical reading of modern media implies that it isn’t: These days, if it bleeds it not only leads but must be aired around the clock with an excruciating level of detail—the pressure of competition and the morbid curiosity of viewers demand it.
Given both the horror and newsiness of school shootings, it may be a fool’s errand to expect restraint from news executives, a deliberate decision to downplay the sensational and dwell less on the personalities and profiles of the killers. But media execs, especially in TV, are regularly confronted with decisions of how to cover other attention-seeking individuals, even in real time. And in at least one type of case, they’ve demonstrated a willingness to systematically focus the cameras elsewhere.
Late in game four of the 2016 NBA Finals, a shirtless male streaker jogged to center court from the baseline opposite to where the ball was in play. He was tackled from behind by security. Jon Healy, a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, distributed footage of the incident. But no one from the other ABC did, the ABC that was televising the game to millions of American viewers.
“A fan just ran on the floor,” narrated Mike Breen, the play-by-play man. Viewers wouldn’t have known, otherwise: The camera was focused on LeBron James. Then it switched to Stephen Curry. Then to a replay. All the while, Breen explained the reason for the delay in the action. “Security is right on top of him,” he said of the invader, who later was identified as a YouTube personality infamous for pulling such stunts at sporting events worldwide.
The choice not to televise the antics was intentional for ESPN, ABC’s broadcast partner. “We have a policy against it,” ESPN communications director Dave Nagle tells me. “We do not want to glorify bad behavior.”
There is no convention or set agreement among networks not to air such court-storming. But many of them have adopted an informal code. A spokesman for CBS Sports told The Weekly Standard that while CBS doesn’t have a set policy, it doesn’t show field-rushers as a matter of practice. Fred Gaudelli, the executive producer of NBC’s Sunday Night Football, said it’s an “unwritten policy everywhere,” in a 2016 interview with Slate.
This perspective is shared widely by sports media. But there have been exceptions. During the 2009 men’s French Open final, NBC zoomed in on a streaker charging Roger Federer and attempting to place a hat on his head. The 30-second incident was ominous: Tennis had been rocked in 1993 when the number-one women’s player, Monica Seles, was stabbed in the back during a match break.
ESPN itself aired one court-storming incident, though it was after the fact. In a 2013 NBA game between the Cavaliers and the LeBron James-led Miami Heat, a young Cavs fan came onto the court during the game to plead with the departed star to return to Cleveland. (James complied two seasons later.) The network turned the saga into a lighthearted segment about the man. “We use content in our storytelling that we typically wouldn’t use other places, if we think it is a compelling story for our fans,” says a spokesman for ESPN’s features unit.
But these exceptions stand out. It’s evident that multiple network staffers, from producers up to corporate brass, have made a good-faith, often successful, effort to deny airtime to people who invade the field of play during televised sporting events. The logic is self-evident: If the attention-seeking interlopers don’t get their 15 seconds of fame, there will be fewer such incidents.
So the media can and do exercise self-control in denying notoriety to people who crave it. But so far only in a realm where the stakes are low. Perhaps they can learn to do the same when the stakes are life and death.
The perspective of too much of the media is, “ ‘This is today’s news,’ ” says John-Michael Keyes. “And mine is, ‘No, you’re writing this into history forever.’ ”
Chris Deaton is a deputy online editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
