The morning after a mass shooting at a Maryland newspaper, Fox News had a photograph of the alleged killer leading its home page. The New York Post tabloid had plastered his face on its cover with the headline: “Newspaper ‘Vendetta’.”
But the home page of CNN.com was different. It was intensely, intimately focused on the five victims of the shooting. Their first names were the headline: “Rob. Gerald. John. Rebecca. Wendi.” The leading graphic on the page showed each of their photographs in turn. There was no photograph of the alleged shooter, and no mention of his name.
NBC’s website had taken a similar approach: no leading photograph of the alleged perpetrator. Prominent headlines on both CNN and NBC’s home pages referred to him only as the “suspect”.
The New York Times and the Washington Post, in contrast, both prominently featured the name on their home pages, but not his photograph.
For years, advocates have been pushing American media outlets to change how they cover mass violence, pointing to research that shows a “contagion effect” in mass shootings and school shootings, and the evidence that many perpetrators model their attacks on previous incidents, and often appear to desire recognition.
It’s a campaign that has been championed by the parents of a 24-year-old killed during the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting, who call for “No Notoriety” for mass shooters, and that has been picked up by parents and student survivors of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting this February.
News coverage of the Capital Gazette shooting showed how much the principle of “No Notoriety” for shooters has taken hold in American newsrooms – and, for advocates, how far there is to go.
Caren Teves lost her son Alex in July 2012, when the 24-year-old was murdered during a shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, while trying to shield his girlfriend with his body. She and her husband Tom spent the hours and days after the shooting watching lurid photographs of the shooter constantly on the news, even as Tom Teves pushed news anchors to focus instead on the bravery of the victims, survivors and first responders.
The “No Notoriety” campaign, which they founded, asks news organizations to “minimize harm” while reporting on mass shootings, including limiting use of the shooter’s name to “once per piece as a reference point, never in the headlines and no photo above the fold”. On Twitter, advocates discuss the issue with the hashtag #nonotoriety.
While there has been some progress in the past six years, “We’re definitely not there yet,” Caren Teves said. “I think it’s been baby steps, unfortunately.”
News organizations have “hit the tipping point” when it comes to “elevating the victims, the heroes and the survivors”, Teves said. “That part they’ve got down.”
But the focus on victims seems like “almost a consolation – ‘Here, we’re doing this’” even as news organizations “still really extensively cover the perpetrator in a way that’s giving notoriety”, Teves said.
The progress Teves has seen over the past six years is “usually very geographically specific”, she said. “Wherever the tragedy seems to hit is where they seem to do a better job, because it hits home, because they know the devastation, they realize that these people in their communities have been hurt beyond words and they don’t want to inflict any more pain.”
CNN.com’s prominent Friday morning focus on the victims of the Capital Gazette shooting was shaped by many factors, including the fact that some of CNN’s staffers had personally known the journalists who were murdered, said S Mitra Kalita, CNN Digital’s vice-president for programming.
But CNN’s tipping point in its approach to covering mass shooting perpetrators had come much earlier, after the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting, according to Meredith Artley, the senior vice-president and editor-in-chief of CNN Digital Worldwide.
“Aurora was a pivotal moment. We knew as journalists and humans that we didn’t need the shooter’s photo in too many places,” Artley wrote in an email.
“Notoriety was a concern. Why should we ‘wallpaper’ an image of the person who committed an act of terror in a place previously considered safe? … It became not just irresponsible but journalistically lazy to repeat the same image again and again.”
“We will on occasion do a small crop of the suspect in the stories that directly address him. But you will not see that portrayed as the main focus of this tragedy.”
Within CNN, there are continuing conversations about the concern that the media plays a role in giving shooters notoriety, Kalita said.
The outlet’s coverage of mass shooters is also shaped by the broader challenges of covering horrific acts of violence that have become, week after week and month after month, “somewhat commonplace”.
“What we don’t want to do is fall into this not mattering, that someone’s life didn’t matter, and I think all of that really guides the decision-making,” Kalita said.
Focusing on the victims of the shooting – their individual stories, their particular loss – is crucial to this, she said, whether that’s a photograph of a school shooting victim getting ready for the high school dance, or the fact that the Capital Gazette editorial writer Gerald Fischman had tried out for Jeopardy twice.
While CNN Digital’s coverage is shaped by broad principles, they have no precise set of rules for how mass shooters will be covered.
“Every story is treated individually and you really make decisions based on the information that you have, the images that you have,” Kalita said.
For Teves, the No Notoriety campaign founder, having news organizations make decisions on a case-by-case basis is not enough.
The media’s approach to covering shootings is frustratingly inconsistent, she said. What she wants is “an across-the-board editorial policy on how these things are reported” so that one piece of thoughtful coverage is not undermined by a sensational article embedded right next to it.
And while individual journalists have taken a stand against giving shooters notoriety, that is not enough for a true tipping point in giving violent attackers fame.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper “will not mention the perpetrator or suspect’s name, and that is wonderful, that takes a lot of courage. But the moment their show is over, the outlet goes right back to undoing everything they just did,” Teves said.
