Back in 2013, I wrote an extensive piece on how the media helps cause mass shootings.
German television debuted "Death of a Student", a six-part series about Claus Wagner, a high school student who commits suicide by jumping under a train. Each episode began with Claus jumping under the train. The series was supposed to teach teenagers that suicide was wrong, but it had the opposite effect.
The real message of "Death of a Student" was the same message as that of Werther Fever, if you kill yourself, lots of people will pay attention to you, and the number of teenage boys killing themselves by jumping under a train increased 175%. Having failed to prevent enough suicides, the show aired a second time. This time fewer people were watching and the suicide rate for teenage boys only went up 115%.
The suicide cluster is a well-known phenomenon, especially among teenagers; it is why the media avoids coverage of teenage suicides... with one exception. A teenager who hangs himself in his garage, jumps under a train or turns on the gas will generally not make the front page or even the back page. But if he takes a gun into a school, opens fire and then commits suicide, Young Werther will be front page news for days, weeks or even months.
While Muslim terrorism is a horse of another color, like more conventional mass shooters, the perpetrators want publicity. And the media is more than happy to give it to them.
Among the most chilling details to emerge in the Orlando massacre is that the killer paused during his three-hour rampage at the Pulse nightclub to search Facebook for news about it.
“Pulse Orlando” and “shooting,” Omar Mateen typed into his smartphone, investigators found.
His real-time search is a striking data point in what has become a pattern in mass shootings: Killers deeply attuned to their media coverage and in some cases engineering it.
The media effectively becomes an accomplice to the attacks in some form. Giving the killer what he wants and then profiting from the result.
The study found that shootings that occurred in schools or ones in which at least four people died — the sorts of incidents that receive widespread media coverage — occurred in clusters. That suggested to researchers the kind of copycat effect that has been well documented for suicides.
After the shootings, the risk of more shootings rose significantly and remained elevated for an average of 13 days, according to the analysis published last year in the journal PLOS One. However, the research found no increased risk after shootings in which at least three people were hit but not necessarily killed, incidents that are so common they usually receive only local news coverage.
“When there was likely to be national or international media coverage, those were the ones where we found contagion,” Towers said.
In short, killers very much do feed off each other. Denying media coverage would not solve the problem of Islamic terrorism as terrorists focus more on what their comrades in the Jihadsphere think of them, but the goal of these attacks is to terrorize Americans. And that requires media coverage.