Media Coverage Wrongly Glamorizes Tragedies

The bombing in Boston, the fertilizer plant explosion in Texas, the countless catastrophic events that rock our world daily: it seems that the world has become more dangerous. However, statistics show otherwise; the rate of violence in the U.S. has actually declined. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the rate of violent victimization committed by strangers has declined by 81 percent between 1993 and 2010.

The illusion that this risk is increasing can be attributed to the heightened coverage that media outlets give disasters.

Students, with their multitude of online accounts, profiles and pages, are constantly bombarded with major news coverage. Whether it be through BBC’s Twitter page or the front page of Reddit, society is focused on inundating the populace with tragic news. It is overwhelmingly difficult to escape the persistence of national reporting.

Media outlets aim to make people more aware of their surroundings, but constant updates of disasters hardly help people feel secure.

“It makes me feel less safe,” senior Patricia Pan said. “After Sandy Hook, everything seemed to escalate in terms of violence and the rate of violence.”

Media outlets, instead of glamorizing tragedies, must take the emphasis off violence when covering crime and disasters.

“Viewers internalize these images and develop a ‘mean world view’ or a scary image of reality,”  a study called The Mainstreaming of America: Violence Profile No. 11 said.

Inflated coverage leads impressionable people to get ideas from what they see. Patterns throughout history show that the likelihood of copycat events has increased. For example, from 1983 to 1986, a sharp influx in the number of subway suicides in Vienna was linked to a dramatic increase in their coverage.

Political Research Associates attributes surges in media coverage of crime and drugs to the augmented attention it receives from officials and politicians. For example, CNN’s coverage of the tragic Boston bombing spiked total viewership by 194 percent compared to viewership from the previous week.
To mitigate the effects of this phenomenon,  screen time given to violence must be decreased and media must instead take the high road.