Terrorism and mass shooting both derive oxygen from the splash they create and the news media's tendency to magnify effects -- and, in turn, ignite the perception of their power.
Terrorist groups manipulate and exploit such buzz and the subsequent sobriety with which news media and academia reflexively study them in order to recruit the angry or ideologically sympathetic.
In order to survive, terrorism therefore targets symbolic people, places and dates, or numbers of people large enough to inspire the insatiable appetite of competitive news.
The more substantial the attention, the more such attention feeds the terror organization's ability to recruit, fund-raise and lend itself the patina of mainstream legitimacy.
The mass shooter, paranoid and having failed at everything else, kills as many as he can for his ticket to immortality. The press rewards the killer by eulogizing the enormity of his power if he achieves enough of a body count. The higher the body count, the more the press knights him with supercelebrityhood, and whatever his human qualities become magnified.
Mass shooters' immortality draws other disaffected misfits who blame the society or a particular group or institution for their misfortune and want to be remembered in lights, rather than forgotten for their ordinariness. When the press creates poignant and sensitive portrayals of mass shooters, these profiles serve as biographical role models for future rampage killers.
In order to prevent crimes of spectacle, we must remove the incentive for those contemplating the crimes. Going forward, the victims and the heroism of tragedies must consume press attention.
Attention to the human toll rather than the spectacle -- as we have learned from Katrina and other Hurricane coverage -- sparks selflessness, charity and facilitates collective community rebuilding. Telling the stories of the departed comforts the mourning and unites the nation.
Promoting and emphasizing the heroism of any catastrophe defines example for others to cultivate civic-mindedness and lessons for intervening to prevent future disasters. Humanizing the departed makes it harder for tomorrow's alienated, as they take this in, to so readily dehumanize people they have never met.
From a crime prevention standpoint, if terrorism only elevates the profiles of victims, turns them into stars and heroes and immortals to be celebrated, mass media have then defeated the purpose of terrorism, mass shooting and the third crime of immortality, targeting the famous such as John Lennon, Ronald Reagan, Gianni Versace, for example.
At the same time, attention to the killers has to be specific and disciplined. Terror groups should be repudiated and ridiculed as subhuman, devolved and primitive. Such messages need to be communicated in all pertinent languages and dialects and through all media from within this country and overseas.
Terror leaders' previous failures and personality disorders, and especially the leaders' insincerity and vice, must be underscored. Their actions should be so intensely delegitimized that whatever group they claim to represent would be embarrassed enough to loudly and categorically reject them. The latter is especially important in order to prevent recruitment and further empowerment of the terrorists.
The press and academia have successfully adopted this strategy for white supremacists; it's time to refine these lessons and adopt them to disincentivize terror affiliation.
Likewise, mass shooters need to be held out as perverts. Mass shooting is a copycat crime. People do follow evildoers; no one, however, follows a pervert.
How our society portrays sex offenders is a useful and successful example. Rapists are never humanized, never depicted through their struggles or their grievances. They are decreed as weirdos, losers and turned into pariahs. Our leaders and mass media focus so much hate and contempt toward sex offenders that some even live in fear. The same must be done to terrorists and mass shooters.
Mass killers should be mentioned as little as possible by name. No book deals, no exclusive interviews with tomorrow's Timothy McVeigh. No coverage of their funerals, no marking their grave. Pictures used to refer to them need to be as small, unappealing and repulsive as possible. Terror leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, so recognized by a picture of him as hairy, unkempt and smarmy, is an example of such effective depiction. And so, mass shooters need to be recalled at their absolute ugliest.
Rather than humanized as bullied, they should be recalled as weak perverts who offered little and took more. Their sexual, athletic and academic incompetence should be emphasized. If the parameters of their disgrace are so complete and so dehumanized, they will inspire no one and will be seen for how pathetic they truly are.
Those who suggest that competitive news coverage does not allow for a more community-minded approach to news coverage should note how restrained the press was in covering the beheadings of prisoners of al Qaeda, including the death of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. And, how the press has disciplined itself in more recent days in its Cho coverage.
The media have a role in the public's right to know; it must ensure that tomorrow's disaffected must ingest mass shooting, terror affiliation and other sensational crime as perverted in order to turn away from it.
In so doing, the press can create and foster role models that inspire those who are struggling to find their purpose in healing their community, rather than in destroying it.
