In a safe little town nestled in New England, the guise of safety that long existed was shattered by the massacring of 26 first graders and teachers in Newton, Connecticut. It is with magnitude that December 12, 2012 struck a chord in the Western world’s media markets.
In the days following the shooting, the usual cycle of events unfolded. The gun debate was reignited in full flare, politicians made the obligatory trek to the scene of the crime, and most media outlets began to cheaply fetishize the depraved lunatic who destroyed the lives of countless human beings.
The perpetrator, a disgruntled former student at Sandy Hook Elementary, was Adam Lanza, and the face of the mentally ill 20-year old adorned newspapers and TV screens from coast to coast. Every aspect of his life was on repeat 24/7, news anchors and columnists getting as much juice out of his disturbed appearance as possible. The 20 innocent children who had perished became mere faces on a collage, the family members of their teachers only given a few seconds of airtime or a ten-word quote.
While this absurdity took its course, a CNN anchorman tried to change the story. Anderson Cooper expressed his disgust at all the attention being devoted to the killer rather than to the victims. Determined to blackout the publicity for Lanza that could have potentially influenced copycat murderers, Cooper began to dedicate every minute of his show, for weeks after the tragedy, to tell millions of viewers about the lives of each child, of each teacher, about their loves, their dreams, the people they touched. He changed the narrative, and rather than advertising the criminal, journalists slowly began to take a hint, and started celebrating the heroes and remembering the victims.
As ISIS storms across Iraq and Syria, raping, enslaving and murdering thousands of women and children, channels like CNN and the CBC, along with other print, internet and television outlets, have apparently forgotten the example that Anderson Cooper set back in 2012.
The Western citizens that have joined the terrorists in the Middle East have begun to dominate the storyline, the chronicling of the humanitarian and economic fallout from the loss of Iraq evermore ignored by sensationalist journalism. John Maguire, a Kemptville teenager fighting with ISIS, is known as the “hockey punk” in Canadian headlines, a “smart guy” with “a sharp wit and a love for rock music.” Douglas McCain, a wannabe rapper and mediocre street thug who was killed in Iraq, has had more face time on global news networks in a day than Iraqi or Syrian civilians get in a week.
Regardless of the general opposition to such individuals, the mainstream media romanticizes them, giving their families a voice, and wistfully wondering about their lives and lost futures. Certainly, intelligence services could have done a better job at preventing their acts, and sure, bad parenting and a lack of input from teachers and social workers need to be lamented. But to report on these criminals as if they need to be remembered, as if they need to be honored in the news cycle, is sick. It is a disgusting betrayal of the power of the Fourth Estate, and large swaths of its members should hang their heads in shame for spewing such content.
While it is unfathomable that young adults, without roots in the Middle East or press credentials of any sort, were sold one-way tickets to a veritable melting pot of foreign Islamist fighters, the cultural paradigm of the issue is as disturbing as security shortfalls. Why are their Facebook accounts not being emptied online? Why are their tweets, their sick thoughts, and the relatives who come to their defense being publicly acknowledged? If we are indeed living in the surveillance age, Western governments should be able to expurgate everything about them, but the media also has the responsibility to report on the foreign terrorists without pictures, without trivialities, and without fanfare.
Instead, family members of terror victims, psychologists and veterans should be given more time to fill the airwaves, because the lost souls contemplating horrific actions need to feel guilty, their guardians need to be warned, and civilized societies need to have their moral consciences stoked every now and then.
Those affected by evil acts should trump the devils that haunt them. While certain criminals have fallen through the cracks and joined the ranks of radical Islam, the press has utterly failed society by martyring them. When one of the most influential checks on power fails those it has the responsibility to serve, civilization, like the ancient sites burning in the Fertile Crescent, is weakened evermore.
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Prince Arthur Herald