The Valentine’s Day massacre at Northern Illinois University was the fourth shooting at a U.S. school in a week. It came on the heels of shootings at Louisiana Technical College, during which two students were killed, and shootings at a high school in Tennessee and a junior high school in California.
The first school shooting that most of us remember—the shooting that set the precedent for how the cable news dealt with subsequent tragedies—was Columbine. It was not unprecedented—In 1966, a student at the University of Texas shot and killed 14 people from the observation deck of a tower on campus.
But the 1999 shooting at Columbine was the first such high-profile crime of a new generation—it shocked the nation and spawned a long-term fascination in the media with exhaustive coverage of such sensational crimes. The cable news networks, still learning the ropes of the relatively-new 24-hour news cycle, latched onto the horrific story and ran with it, airing photos of the young killers, pictures of their weapons, and unending footage of sobbing families and fleeing schoolchildren.
Between the 1966 University of Texas shooting and the 1999 Columbine massacre, by my count, there were 20 school shootings in the U.S.
By contrast, after Columbine, in the span of the last nine years, there have been 25—four in the last week alone.
I first became concerned with the role of the news media in covering these events after the Virginia Tech shooting of April 2007. The killer sent a press kit to NBC News before his final shooting spree, hoping they would air a multimedia manifesto that consisted of homemade videos of the killer, photographs of him holding guns and glowering at the camera, and several pages of incoherent rambling.
NBC News decided to devote most of their evening news broadcast to the airing of the manifesto. Anchorman Brian Williams even played over two minutes of clips of the killer ranting about spilling his classmates’ blood and comparing himself to Jesus Christ.
I was furious—I wrote a letter to NBC, condemning their decision to focus so single-mindedly on the killer. Even presidential candidates, I wrote, don’t get two full minutes of airtime on a nightly news show with which to outline their positions.
The coverage, I thought, only fed into the plans of a deranged killer who intended to attain infamy by killing his classmates. He didn’t fear hatred; he feared obscurity. He wanted the world to know his name. And regrettably, NBC complied. They served as a mouthpiece to deliver his twisted ideology to the world.
The same trend has continued over the last year—more than one killer has made reference to becoming “famous” in his suicide note. And within a day of the NIU murders, the killer’s name, picture and biography were splashed across the TV screens of America, as pundits and eyewitnesses and acquaintances of the killer waxed philosophical about what caused him do it.
There is already a widespread understanding among journalists that certain people—like rape victims and jury members, for example—shouldn’t be named in news stories.
I’d like to see that standard extended to the perpetrators of school shootings, as well. Or if they must name him or her, I’d like to see them do so only in passing, without the perverse degree of fawning fascination that I too often see.
I’d be willing to bet that if the perpetrators of school shootings stopped getting such sensational posthumous fame, we’d see a lot fewer shootings.

Reach Ruth DeFoster at RMDefost2404@winona.edu