Think for a moment about the last atrocity that circulated around the media. Unfortunately, in our day and age, you’ll probably only have to go back a few days — maybe it was a shooting, a terrorist attack, a riot or an instance of police brutality. Whatever the case, chances are the minute word got out, society automatically looked for the video footage of it. We are quickly becoming used to horrifying media accompanying the latest breaking news story, and this serves no real purpose besides creating an environment of frenzy and increased fear within our communities.
Social media has become crucial in the instantaneous availability of disturbing news stories and videos. One study actually showed how viewing these violent events via social media can perpetuate PTSD. Twenty-two percent of participants (none of whom had any previous trauma) in the study showed symptoms of PTSD and were “significantly affected” after seeing footage of school shootings and suicide bombings online.
Oftentimes, the minute details and specifics that are caught on camera or hashed out in news sequences and articles become the focus of the news. Instead of focusing on solutions to the problem, the media offers us the problem presented in a million different ways, and society seems to have no issue with it. Take, for example, the onslaught of gun violence manifested in schools and public spaces in recent years — most news stories were centered around the shooter, his/her history of mental illness, the red flags that people may have missed and some small anecdotes about the victim(s). This is not to say no attention should be given to victims of horrible acts, but it truly isn’t the most efficient way to handle any grave situation.
The first priority should be making sure that it doesn’t happen again, and the media can truly be the perfect medium through which to have a society-wide conversation about potential solutions. The news, both on television and off, can be effectively utilized as a tool to reach out to the public in order to gain insight into what kinds of solutions are plausible in certain communities.
Too much press for any act of violence only gives attention to the perpetrators and creates hysteria in the public, which robs us of rational decision making. Unfortunately, as they say in the news world, if it bleeds it leads. For example, ISIS has been in the news every day without fail for months now. Major news sites and channels are the first to jump on a story of an ISIS recruitment process, terrorist attack or beheading. Footage of these acts are put on the web and on television for the world to see (which only makes the tech-savvy terrorist group more popular; they actually ranked second place behind “Ebola” in terms of popularity, according to Google Trends).
There hasn’t, however, been a single article detailing the ways we can lessen the power and global influence of ISIS through trade embargoes and agreements with certain nations. To put it simply, the news that “trends” on Google and Twitter is generally not concerned with cultivating intelligent discussions about potential solutions to problems. There is no media popularity for rational discourse. It is the gruesome details, the grim accounts of witnesses and victims and the personal anecdotes that do nothing but frighten and negatively influence the public that are most accessible through the media.
By sensationalizing violence, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to rationalize and discuss potential solutions with one another. We rob ourselves of a safer future and instead create the hype that those committing violent acts need to thrive. Essentially, our obsession and attachment to discussing the problem instead of the solution could ensure we never actually discover one.