Needed: A New Way to Cover Mass Shootings

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. As people around the country cope in the aftermath of high-profile mass shootings in Boulder and Atlanta last month, the media's coverage of gun violence may leave you disappointed and angry. It does that with so many people. If you're a survivor of gun violence, for example, or a friend or family member of a victim of gun violence, you may even feel left out of the coverage. If you live in New York, you may have spotted a couple of unusual news boxes with a paper called The Inevitable News.

It's a chilling fill-in-the-blank template of a front-page newspaper story that features details from the selection of mass shootings that have been in the news in the last three years. Each story is identical, except for the victim's names and locations. That's a project of the Columbia Journalism Review, which is calling attention to the need for a new approach to the way the American media cover mass shootings and gun violence, the repetition in the sense that we're all in an endless pattern of murderous tragedy followed by political gridlock.

This may also call to mind the Satirical News site The Onion that republishes the same headline after every high-profile mass shooting, "No way to prevent this says only nation where this regularly happens." Yesterday CJR hosted a summit to reconceive how US media outlets cover mass shootings. With me now to talk about it is Kyle Pope, editor in chief and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review. Kyle, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Kyle Pope: Thanks, Brian. Glad to be here.

Brian Lehrer: I see that yesterday summit began with an introduction by Manuel and Patricia Oliver, whose 17-year-old son Joaquin was one of the 17 killed in the Parkland shooting in Florida. How did they get this important conversation started?

Kyle Pope: They basically devoted their lives to fighting gun violence since their son was killed. They have an organization called Change the Ref. I wanted to talk to them because I wanted to talk to somebody who had been the focus and the subject of journalism after a mass shooting to get a sense of what that was like. Also, they've been so involved in media since 2018, just to get their sense of how the coverage is going, whether there has been an improvement in how news organizations cover gun violence. Basically, you can probably guess what their answer was.

Basically, Manuel especially is outspoken on this, he calls the media treatment of mass shootings of gun violence, "The show." We all know what the show is. It's the initial breaking news event with the drama of whatever's unfolding. There is the shock and the focus on victims and their families, and there's a move to who the shooter is, and why he did what he did. Then there's a brief discussion of what are we going to do about all this, and then it all stops at that point. When you talk to journalists who are involved in this coverage, they are incredibly frustrated.

They will tell you that it's demoralizing, and they will tell you that there's just a sameness to it and that it just goes on and on and on and over and over again the exact same way. We just decided there must be a better approach here. just as a short aside, CJR, a couple of years ago, noticed something similar in the coverage of the climate crisis. You had a lot of coverage of hurricanes and wildfires and of dramatic storms. These were getting a lot of news coverage but people, especially on local television and national television, weren't connecting the dots between these weather events and what was going on with the climate crisis.

We basically said, "Journalism has to do better. We need to cover the climate crisis for this existential ongoing event that it is." We put together a collaboration of newsrooms around the world. We called it Covering Climate Now. It now has 400 media organizations, more than four 400, representing an audience of about 2 billion people. It's moved the needle on climate coverage, people are doing more and they're doing better climate coverage.

Brian Lehrer: Just for the record, as you know, we are one of those news organizations. We've got a Covering Climate Now series coming up in two weeks, but go ahead.

Kyle Pope: Thank you. WNYC has been enthusiastic. This all reminds me of hearing President Obama talk about mass shootings, both while he was in office, and after he was out of office, and talking about how frustrated he was, and how powerless he felt about what was going on, and he's the President of the United States. What strikes me about the press is that we actually have this in our power, we don't need Congress to act to do a better job of covering these stories. We don't need legislation to say, we're going to approach this differently. We control our airwaves and our columns, and our airtime so it's on us.

You mentioned this inevitable news, these newspapers which are just aimed at showing almost thoughtless, rote, inevitable nature of it. Then this summit that we had yesterday, which we had people from the New York Times, from The Washington Post, from the Guardian, from The Trace, which does an amazing job of covering gun violence, from the New Yorker. It was all a bit like, "How can we get out of this loop that we're in?"

Brian Lehrer: Let me give you an example from your summit and see how you would respond to the concern that she raised. One of the panelists who took part yesterday, I see, was Abené Clayton, a reporter on the Guardian's Guns and Lies in America project, as they call it. Let me read from a piece that she co-authored with Lois Beckett there, headlined, "Everything About America's Gun Debate is Wrong, Here's Why." They write, "The way the American media cover mass shootings makes us all collaborators. Even as media outlets try to focus more attention on the victims of shootings and get perpetrators less notoriety, the fundamental equation of mass shootings has not changed. Kill enough people and you will get national attention," she wrote.

What might a better way to cover mass shootings, like the ones that happened just last month be? Should they be covered less, despite the enormity of their consequences, or the shooter be covered less, despite the fact that there are almost always relevant root causes that maybe should be looked at to help avoid future incidents?

Kyle Pope: Abené was at our event yesterday, and there's a little bit more to that piece. She goes on to say that, and this is something that came out again and again and again, yesterday, "Coverage of gun violence in the US by American media is racist. Depending on, if you are a person of color that is the shooter, you are covered differently than if you are a white person. If you are a victim who is a person of color, you are covered differently than if you are a white victim." First, to answer the question you asked and then to get back to that. Mass shootings comprise a very, very, very small percentage of the number of people who die from gun violence in the US every year, but they receive the overwhelming majority of the coverage.

Again, they're relatively simple events in the sense of something huge and dramatic happens, and it's easy to capture images of this. What is less easy to capture is the ongoing everyday, day in and day out carnage that's happening across the country. We had a trauma surgeon on the summit yesterday, a woman named Dr. Jessica Beard from Philadelphia who has also gotten involved in improving coverage there. She says, basically, in her ER, every day is a mass shooting. You have 10 people, 12 people, 8 people coming in every day, but nobody pays attention to this. Apparently nobody pays attention because these victims, they come from communities that are challenged in any number of ways, and it's just not something that people are focused on.

Brian Lehrer: It's also a systemic event. If a plane crashes and 200 people die, that's going to make the headlines. If car crashes, one at a time, kill 200 people every week, that's not going to make the headlines.

Kyle Pope: This is a super strong theme that emerged from this conversation yesterday. One is we need to cover the in-between. We need to cover all of the people who are victims of gun violence outside of these dramatic mass shootings. It's not to say that we shouldn't cover the mass shootings. It's not to say that those aren't stories that need attention, but 20,000 Americans died last year from gun violence in the midst of a lockdown, which was the most deadly year in decades in this country. That's not to mention the people who died from suicide by gun. What we need to do is we need to view this as a crisis that is unfolding every day in this country and that we need to cover it as a daily crisis.

We need to cover the causes and we needed to cover solutions. There's a lot of interesting work, and this is something that we had somebody on from the Kansas City Star, which has been doing a great series on gun violence in Missouri. They're really focused on community groups that are really out there trying to do intervention strategies and working in these communities to help solve this problem. That, for some reason, there almost is a sense in the coverage of gun violence that, and certainly is, it is depressing and it seems unsolvable. That is contributing to the coverage, which gives us no idea of, is there a way out of this, is there a possible solution?

When you talk to the trauma surgeon that we had yesterday, she says, there is. She says this is a public health crisis, and there are interventions here that can work just like there are interventions that work in public health. Finally, let me just make one more point, and then I'll stop. It's also really interesting to think about covering this coming out of a pandemic. We basically lived through this year where I think personally that the pandemic reporting generally in the American press has been quite good. You had the initial wave of illness, and then you had a lot of really serious efforts trying to understand why certain communities, why people in certain communities got sick while others didn't.

What were the structural, race, economic issues, healthcare issues that led to these early high rates of illness? What about healthcare in different communities, depending on where you live? That became a complete story that helped us understand the pandemic, and now it's helping us understand the vaccine, the vaccine rollout. We can do this as a profession. We can look at this as something more than just a breaking news event. When there's something horrific that happens in a school or somewhere else, we can look at it in a more complete way, but we're not doing it yet on the guns, and that's the point we're trying to make.

Brian Lehrer: We have a few minutes for phone calls before we run out of time from Kyle Pope, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review on coverage of gun violence in the United States. 646-435-7280. TK and Rocklin County, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling, TK.

TK: Hi, good morning Brian. As usual, you have a great show. Your guest is spectacular. I agree with the gentlemen, the coverage is so racist it's not even funny. That's not the only part that bothers me. What bothers me the most is the coverage is the same thing. What you do with the war effort. You guys sanitize everything. I've seen the BBC. I've seen the TCRs. They show the bodies, they show the blood on there. "Look, breasts. Look, sex. Look, look." When it's people getting murdered, they want to sanitize it and make it nice and clean and tidy so the Qanon people can say, "It's not true. They didn't kill all those little kids." If they'd have seen those little babies, Brian, they would have known it was true.

Brian Lehrer: TK. I'm going to leave it there and get a response. What do you think about that point? He's saying the international media television shows the blood from war and gun violence more than the American media, which tries to sanitize it to make it palatable, but in so doing fails to report the depth of the story.

Kyle Pope: TK, it's so interesting that you bring that up because this came up yesterday in our conversation. One of the other panelists who's a colleague of mine at Columbia made this exact point. Basically said, unfortunately, that unless you start to see bodies, the tone of the coverage and the political response is not going to change. I thought it was a really provocative point to make. Frankly, it made me a little uncomfortable because also on the panel was a father of a teenager who had been killed in the school shooting. I thought what was amazing was that the response to that father, Manuel Oliver was, this is what he said yesterday. He said, "I would be willing to show pictures of my dead kid if it would change the debate."

It's a really provocative idea, but that's what he said. It's something that we have to grapple with.

Brian Lehrer: There is this sensitivity that people in the media try to show to not traumatizing and re-traumatizing people. We see it again with the Derek Shovan trial, where that video, that horrible video and excerpts from it, are played over and over and over again. We are talking in the media about retraumatization of so many, especially Black people in America. That's not to say that it's right or wrong to show it, but it raises that issue.

Kyle Pope: I remember, Brian, interviewing recently somebody who was the editor of the newspaper that covered the Columbine shooting. Pretty sure it was Columbine. He was really struggling with it. They had a picture of some kids' bodies, and he really struggled with it whether to publish the picture and he did. He actually, in hindsight, thought that was the right thing to do because it galvanized people in a way that they hadn't been galvanized before.

Brian Lehrer: Duke in Jersey City you are on WNYC with Kyle Pope from Columbia Journalism Review. Hi Duke.

Duke: Hi, Brian, how you doing? Hi, Kyle.

Kyle Pope: Hi.

Duke: Brian, I don't want to put a negative spin on this. This is an issue that we all talk about all the time, but let's be honest. Can you tell me what type of law can be passed that could prevent me from getting a gun? Now, if we look at the numbers I think there's something like 400 million firearms that exist in the United States right now, and they're still manufacturing weapons. I'm in Jersey City. I could go 30 minutes from where I live at in any direction and buy a weapon for, say, $200 on the street.

Brian Lehrer: I'm going to get you a response. Then we're going to be out of time for the segment. Duke, keep calling in. He's got a point there. What is it at a policy level that the media could be focusing on that it's not focusing on that can make an actual meaningful difference in the availability of guns in any near or medium-term way?

Kyle Pope: Well, there are a lot of things not to make it impossible for people to get guns, but just to make it harder and to make them have to pause more than they pause now. There're background checks. There are bans on certain weapons. This is stuff that there's a new lease on this debate under the new administration. In a way, I don't say this to punt on the question because I think it's a legislative question. I'm focused on how do we get our reader's attention on the problem. In my experience, you're not going to get legal bodies to act unless there's public pressure that comes from the ground up on how this is not acceptable anymore.

There's an active debate in journalism about the lines between advocacy and media. I just think this is a case where there's too many people dying on the streets of the country to be able to say that aggressively pointing this out and aggressively saying that this isn't acceptable. I think that's well within the realm of good journalism.

Brian Lehrer: Clearly pointing it out too, and I'll close with this. Nicholas Christophe had what I thought was a great package on this a few weeks ago in his New York Times column with some easy to look at graphics that are horrifying, but they were right there in front of your eyes. Guns per 100 people, the United States has 120 guns per 100 people. The next closest is Canada, with just 34. Then guess what? Gun murders per 100,000 people, the United States in a league of its own with 3.4 gun murders per 100,000 people. The next is Canada with 0.6. In a way, it's so simple, and yet it's absolutely dramatic and hits you in the gut.

Kyle Pope: Going back to the Olivers, these parents from Florida. They moved here from Venezuela. They moved to this country to give their kids a better life, and they chose this community, Parkland, Florida, because people told them the public schools were good. That's why they came here, and then their son ended up getting killed there. When you step back and look at the numbers like the ones you just quoted, Brian, it's an absurd situation that we're living through in this country. I think it's on the press to point this out. I don't think we can step back and say, "Well, that's political or this is controversial." It's not controversial that too many people are dying from gun violence here compared to any other country on earth.

Brian Lehrer: Kyle Pope, Editor in Chief and Publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review talking about CJR summit to reconceived how US media outlets cover mass shootings and gun violence in general. Thanks so much for sharing this with us.

Kyle Pope: Thanks for having me, Brian.

 

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