Photo: ONTHEMEDIA.ORG
Back in 2013, there were 30 mass killings (defined as the death or injury of more than four people at the same time), and believe it or not, the violence and victims in 2013 are in line with the average since 2006 – 29 mass killings and 147 victims a year, according to USA TODAY database. But 2015 is breaking records – we’ve had 294 mass shootings in 2015 and the year isn’t finished yet. That’s a horrifying statistic.
Mass shootings are so common in this country, OnTheMedia created the Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook: Active Shooter Edition. It’s a handbook for us, the media consumer, on how to handle all the media attention and wade through all the invariably wrong facts that come out with each of these atrocities.
This handbook is meant to help us, “weed through all the bad information reported by the media in the wake of these mass shootings.”
We all know the news, in their rush to have the latest and most titillating details, gets many aspects of these events wrong, so they thought we need some help wading through the media jungle of misinformation and just wrong “facts” about every detail of the event. It’s designed for you to print it and keep it next to your computer or TV while you gorge on all the gruesome media coverage.
We have reached a point where mass shootings have a consumer handbook and where the most helpful journalistic tool in covering a killing isn’t local sources anymore, it’s search-and-replace. According to The Daily Beast, Newsweek report Polly Mosendz keeps a pre-written mass shooter story fresh in her text editing files.
“A mass shooting has been reported at ________, where ________ people are believed to be dead and _______ more are injured, according to ______________ police department,” it says. “The gunman has/hasn’t been killed/apprehanded/is still at large.”
In the hours after the California killings, heavy traffic has crashed a mass shooter database, and it’s still down as I write this CUFBI piece.
This handbook may help us in the next few days, but it can’t answer this question about us here in the USA: Which is more horrifying – that so many people are seeking out information on mass shootings, or that there is so much information about them?
