Hurt lock Holmes, dismantle the media bombardment

Within hours of a Batman midnight showing gone horribly wrong, word of the Aurora shooting exploded into the national news spotlight.

The media leapt in like a flying squirrel and latched on like a bloodsucking leech. It isn’t the leaping in that is bad; quick, precise news reporting is necessary for informing the nation. It’s the latching on and the bloodsucking extraction of detail for several weeks afterward that creates a new species of problems.

Media outlets are taking this incident, putting it up on their channel, and covering this issue repeatedly for ratings. We shouldn’t get sucked in by this shock TV—it lets the media lasso our emotions, manipulating and exploiting them just to get better ratings.

This behavior by the media needs to stop. The news needs to move on to reporting other new news. Its title is literally the news; maybe its name needs to change to the “olds.” At this rate the next thing you know they’re going to start reporting on if Holmes wore boxers or briefs the night of the shooting.

Circumstances like this need to be handled with the utmost kindness. Focusing on the killer, his name, face, and plastering it on our TV screens leads to copycat killings. To malevolent psychos, having their face on every single TV in America is the equivalent to winning an Olympic gold medal in mass murder.

The media is a part of the problem. Something like this should be handled with more discretion, like how they handle streakers at sporting events by immediately cutting away from them. Acts like this does not promote these kinds of actions, and instead lets the game of life continue without selfish interruptions. Stealing lives should not be rewarded.

The media is so wrapped up in getting better ratings that they’ve trapped themselves in a cocoon with an unlikely springtime rebirth unless if they see that a transformation is necessary. After the Columbine High School massacre the media unleashed laser-guided reporting with their sights focused on the two senior students who ran free on a shooting spree. The victims became the runner-ups with assholes gaining the spotlight.

On April 28, 1999 the W. R. Myers High School shooting was a subsequent repeat school shooting that occurred in Taber, Alberta, Canada that unfurled no more than eight days after the Columbine High School massacre. Shouldn’t massacres like this get up in the media’s face and scream bloody murder to stop?
The gunman in this incident was a 14-year-old that walked into a building meant for life improvement and began firing at students right in the middle of a high school just like Columbine. This much evidence should already close the case on media exploitation and be filed in the cabinet under “overkill.”

Only days after the Aurora massacre, Timothy Courtois was pulled over for speeding. Law enforcement found an assault rifle, four handguns, and several boxes of ammunition, along with news clippings about the Aurora shooting. He told authorities he was on his way to shoot his former boss.

The media is ready to pounce on the littlest story that has to do with this incident. The Advocate received a call within a week of the shooting from CBS, then again only a week before school started, several weeks after the incident.

The morbid fascination with every single detail of a deranged shooter force-fed by the media through the internet and television doesn’t move society forward. This kind of reporting puts us two steps forward and three steps back on an unsteady gyrating treadmill.

The only way this can stop is if we as a society stop feasting on this unhealthy diet cooked up by gluttonous media outlets. We need to work out what is right and wrong instead of neglecting the ethical salad in the back of the vegetable bin and gorging on fast-food media.