Media Reporting Violence

*Columbine High School (AP)*

Based on the article from my previous post, violence among children is truly a huge problem; but the question is, how does it all start?

Since I have had a lot of communications and news courses, I have started to really look at how the media covers certain stories. While reading a news story about a murderer, I noticed that every newspaper and type of media was covering the story in a way that really stood out to me. Instead of discussing the actual victims, the news was only talking about the murderer and his story. This made no sense to me because in my mind I do not care about the man's biography and was more interested in the people who were innocently killed.

The same can be said for how the media covers school killings, and even school violence in general. The media narrows in on the people actually doing the bad things, not the children who are having bad things done to them.

According to the article that I highlighted in my previous blog post, the way that media covers and reports on school violence, and any violence for that matter, is by providing the culprits with his or her "15 minutes of fame." This has a very high outcome of attention deprived individuals viewing violence and doing something very violent in order to get noticed and receive attention.

The article goes on to discuss how the way in which violence, especially school violence, is covered and reported on. In the article, it is said that reporters are basically forgetting about the SPJ Code of Ethics dealing with Minimizing Harm. "Reporters pressured to get the story and make it central on the nightly news may not be sensitive to the effects of their coverage in the larger scheme of things," as stated within the article. Reporters need to try to have a balance between reporting the happenings of the event and the people involved in the event. Instead of focusing so much on the culprits, since that is the most exciting portion, reporters need to look at all views and specifically the side of the story of the victims.

The article also states that a terrific idea would be for professionals to start an alliance with students in order to learn how to properly report on school violence. Students know how a report on violence affects them and their peers, therefore it would be a fantastic idea to discuss this topic with children.

Children are portrayed as the innocent and not able to understand the depth of a story along with the different parts, however, as highlighted within the article, children can understand a news story and it does affect them.

Until this year I honestly did not think that children were able to fully understand news stories about school violence, however after the school shooting in Connecticut this year and watching the way that what the news was saying was affecting my seven year old cousin, I can definitely see that children do understand. She was frightened to go to school and asked me why they kept talking about the scary man but weren't really showing the kids who were killed. I honestly did not know what to say.

The way that media covers and reports on school violence needs to change! These stories are about children, yet children are being portrayed in a way in which makes them seem as if they are too young naive to understand what has happened. However, we should never underestimate children, especially because as my previous blog post and the two parts of the article highlight, children are very capable of extreme violence and even murder!

The article that is discussed in this blog post can be found at: http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/weird/kids1/media_7.html

As stated in the last blog post, to learn more about this topic and to read the 2 part story about "Kids Who Kill," visit:

Part One: http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/weird/kids1/index_1.html
Part Two: http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/weird/kids2/index_1.html