Unfortunately, tragedy has seemingly become a partisan issue in America.
Anytime anything happens, our elected officials always have to provide their spin about how these new developments strengthen the validity of their world view. The politicization of catastrophe has come into full view once again with the recent school shooting in Florida. However, the recent shooting and subsequent advocacy of the Parkland students may actually lead some in politics to change their position on gun control. We may finally get our government to do something to prevent these acts of terror, but our non-governmental institutions need to also make an effort to curtail terrorism.
Mass shooters and other terrorists, regardless of their ideological motivation, believe they can attain some sense of immortality based on the pervasiveness of their infamy. Therefore, media organizations should join The Daily Wire in a unified, apolitical effort to not publish a name or picture of terrorist actors, including everyone from suicide bombers to mass shooters.
Obviously, to conduct thorough investigative reporting, journalists should still seek to find out the identity of egregious criminals privately. However, the public doesn’t need to know a terrorist by anything except “the shooter” or “the bomber.” This is not to say that there isn’t value in prying into the character of these perpetrators.
For instance, The Wall Street Journal uncovered the fact that the Las Vegas shooter’s father was also a homicidal individual and lived in a broken home most of his childhood. This individual had no immediately obvious “motive,” so details like these are important to contextualize the terror and provide possible closure.
However, it’s possible the Las Vegas shooter wanted everyone to scrutinize his life and persona. Post-mortem attention could have been all he desired. While there is no way to know for sure for individual cases, the general trend holds true that people who commit acts of terror want to seek validation in some form from the brutality of their crime. Some people, strangely enough, fantasize over a legacy of being a demented individual. Media outlets of all forms should not grant these kinds of criminals their ultimate wish by turning them in to de facto celebrities.
In addition, media outlets should try to limit these depictions to reduce social stereotyping. The obsession over the image and identity of extraordinarily violent criminals leads to an increase in implicit and explicit biases. Humans generally like putting people into subconscious “boxes” to fill in gaps in one’s perception of the world.
For instance, the New York Halloween terrorist having a “foreign-sounding name” apparently justified President Trump’s call to ban refugees from certain countries, despite the terrorist not being from any of the proposed countries. According to the CATO Institute in 2016, the likelihood of dying from a refugee terrorist attack is 1 in 3.6 billion, but some people still say Trump’s travel ban addresses a necessary threat.
By allowing people to arbitrarily obsess over terror incidents of their choosing, media outlets do nothing but help reinforce people’s internal prejudices. These tendencies distort the realities of terror threats. Some might say that they feel legitimate fear when they are at the airport and see someone wearing a turban. However, the FBI has consistently maintained, even during the Trump Administration under Chris Wray, that white supremacists pose an equal if not greater terror threat than Islamic terrorists. Divulging demographic data demonstrates whatever trend people are predisposed to conclude. This makes it easier for white terrorists to be labeled as “troubled” and “mentally ill” while people of color are labeled as deviant sub-humans.
The Daily Wire’s pledge will require some case-by-case analysis. But if media organizations uphold the same broad concept as policy, we could see a legitimate cultural shift in how we perceive terrorism. Also, we could make these events less likely.
I recently learned in my politics in health policy class that America is the last industrialized nation that uses a health infrastructure based on the sickness model, instead of the prevention model. Essentially, we treat people when they’re sick and don’t put emphasis on taking preventative measures to ensure that people don’t get sick in the first place.
The same goes for how we treat terrorist attacks. We react to tragedy as it happens, but we haven’t done enough collective introspection to understand why these tragic events happen. We must take away every possible incentive for someone to do the unthinkable. Media should follow The Daily Wire and set a new, better precedent.
Paul Bousquet is a sophomore majoring in economics. His columns runs biweekly.
