CNN’s Anderson Cooper refused on Monday to say the name of the man who shot and killed 49 people this weekend at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., continuing an increasingly popular policy of denying mass shooters the attention and infamy they are assumed to crave.
“We begin tonight with their names, the names of the 48 out of 49 people who have so far been identified, victims of the deadliest mass shooting in American history,” Cooper, who is openly gay, began Monday evening.
“There’s one name I want to tell you that you will not hear during this broadcast tonight, one picture of a person you won’t see,” he added. “We will not say the gunman’s name or show his photograph. It’s been shown far too much already.”
By denying the Orlando gunman, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, the spotlight, Cooper continued his policy of refusing to name mass shooters. But Cooper is not the only member of the press to put this theory into practice.
Megyn Kelly has followed this policy on-and-off-again on her Fox News program, dating back to at least 2014 when she refused to say the name of the man who shot and killed three people in Fort Hood, Texas.
“Authorities are identifying the shooter. If you are interested, you can get his name on other shows, like the one that preceded this one and online, but we have decided not to name these mass killers here as a policy here on ‘The Kelly File.’ Too often it is infamy they seek, and we decline to help,” she said.
She declined again in October to say the name of a man who shot and killed 10 people at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore.
“We will not name or show you the face of this shooter, as is the policy of this program,” she said at the time. “I have been saying this for a long time. We the news media need to be more responsible and more careful and more aware of our own role in fanning these flames … We make these men infamous.”
However, Kelly hasn’t always adhered to this policy, as she named Syed Farook in December as one of the co-conspirators in a deadly mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., which claimed the lives of 14 people.
She has also used Mateen’s name on-air.
The idea behind the name blackout is that by refusing to give shooters the sort of notoriety one would reserve for an A-list celebrity, media and law enforcement are protecting against copycat killers.
Journalists and police “need to do more to deprive the killer of an audience,” Ari Schulman, executive editor of the New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society, argued in 2013 in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.
“The massacre killer chooses to believe it is not he but the world that is filled with hatred — and then he tries to prove his dark vision by making it so,” he added. “If we can deprive him of the ability to make his internal psychodrama a shared public reality, if we can break this ritual of violence and our own ritual response, then we might just banish these dreadful and all too frequent acts to the realm of vile fantasy.”
But not everyone agrees that withholding the shooter’s identity is a noble and useful policy.
“It isn’t … a meaningful response, but a collective spectacle enacted to keep despair at bay,” the Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott wrote in 2015 after the Umpqua shooting.
“Better, perhaps, to embrace the despair, let it break us apart and grind us down. Enforcing ritual oblivion and policing the social-media posts of other people won’t help. Instead, say the name of this young man, look into his eyes, and remember: We made him, we armed him, we own him,” he added.
Though there are some disagreements in media over whether it’s worth blotting out the identity of mass shooters, there is a general consensus that it’s an idea worth considering.
“By custom, the U.S. media doesn’t report troop movements or the names of underage rape victims. Outlets follow certain practices when reporting on suicide, too,” the Atlantic’s Connor Friedersdorf argued in 2014.
“There’s no reason that better practices can’t develop around mass shootings,” he mused.
Vox’s Ezra Klein wrote that same year, “Mass murderers want glory and fame. Somehow, we need to stop giving it to them.”
Media critic Steven Buttry wrote in 2012 that he sees the reasoning behind the policy, but added he’s not sure if it’s practical for newsrooms to withhold information.
“Perhaps this is a foolish suggestion. Even if all the professional media could act in unison, the name (even if it wasn’t the right name) would fly around on social media,” he wrote. “This would require compromising a central principle of journalism. But maybe some flexibility on principles would set a good example for the politicians who have refused for years to address this failing of our society.”
“It’s not enough, and it doesn’t feel right. But damn, this feels too wrong to not do what we can,” he added.
As media continues to grapple with the idea of intentionally withholding information from the public, an increasing number of public officials have started to adopt the policy on their own.
On Monday, FBI Director James Comey also refused to say Mateen’s name, explaining he didn’t want to reward the killer with “some twisted notion of fame or glory.”
“I am not using the killer’s name and I will try not to do that,” he said at a press conference. “Part of what motivates sick people to do this kind of thing is some twisted notion of fame or glory and I don’t want to be part of that, for the sake of the victims and their families and so that other twisted minds don’t think that this is a path to fame and recognition.”
In October 2015, Oregon Sheriff John Hanlin refused in a CNN interview to say the name of the Umpqua shooter.
“I don’t want to glorify the shooter. I don’t want to glorify his name. I don’t want to glorify his cause. In order to prevent that, I’m refusing to state his name,” he said.
“The Oregon state medical examiner’s office will put out a notice identifying who the shooter is, but, again, that’s the only information that will come out. You won’t hear his name from me or from this investigation,” he added.
Douglas County Commissioner Chris Boice agreed, and encouraged Oregonians at the time to never say the shooter’s name.
“I challenge you all to never utter his name,” he said at a vigil for the victims. “This is about the families, this is about the victims, this is about our community, and this is about the tragic loss that we all suffered today. This is not about the shooter.”
