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The Copycat Effect
How The Media and Popular Culture Trigger The
Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines
by Loren Coleman
Paraview Pocket Books - Simon and Schuster,
2004, 308 pages
MEDIA CONTACT: (207) 772-0245
or Email
Loren Coleman {@} maine.rr.com
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[The following
concluding excerpt from The
Copycat Effect is based on over thirty years
of research, case studies, and media guidelines
detailed in that book's three hundred pages.
Please refer to that work for supportive data,
examples, related material, and an extensive
twenty-page bibliography.]
* * *
Recommendations
* * *
Suicides, murder-suicides, and murders the
events that are at the core of the most negative
projections of the copycat effect -- will remain
newsworthy in the eyes of the media in the
foreseeable future and will continue to be
reported. So what, short of self-censorship,
should the media do to halt the contagion of the
copycat effect? While the recommendations of
prevention experts during the last two decades
have applied specifically to suicides, I have
generalized them so that they also apply to all
forms of violence that fall under the
media-driven propagation of the copycat effect.
Here, then, are my seven recommendations:
(1) The media must be more aware of the power of
their words. Using language like "successful"
sniper attacks, suicides, and bridge jumpers,
and "failed" murder-suicides, for example,
clearly suggest to viewers and readers that
someone should keep trying again until they
"succeed." We may wish to "succeed" in
relationships, sports, and jobs, but we do not
want rampage or serial killers, architects of
murder-suicide, and suicide bombers to make
further attempts after "failing." Words are
important. Even the use of "suicide" or
"rampage" in headlines, news alerts, and
breaking bulletins should be reconsidered.
(2) The media must drop their clichéd stories
about the "nice boy next door" or the "lone
nut." The copycat violent individual is neither
mysterious nor healthy, or usually an
overachiever. They are often a fatal combination
of despondency, depression, and mental illness.
School shooters are suicidal youth that slipped
through the cracks, but it is a complex issue,
nevertheless. People are not simple. The
formulaic stories are too often too simplistic.
(3) The media must cease its graphic and
sensationalized wall-to-wall commentary and
coverage of violent acts and the details of the
actual methods and places where they occur.
Photographs of murder victims, tapes of people
jumping off bridges, and live shots of things
like car chases ending in deadly crashes, for
example, merely glamorize these deaths, and
create models for others down to the method,
the place, the timing, and the type of
individual involved. Even fictional
entertainment, such as the screening of The
Deer Hunter, provides vivid copycatting
stimuli for vulnerable, unstable, angry, and
depressed individuals.
(4) The media should show more details about the
grief of the survivors and victims (without
glorifying the death), highlight the
alternatives to the violent acts, and mention
the relevant background traits that may have
brought this event to this deathly end. They
should also avoid setting up the incident as a
logical or reasonable way to solve a problem.
(5) The media must avoid ethnic, racial,
religious, and cultural stereotypes in
portraying the victims or the perpetrators. Why
set up situations that like-minded individuals
(e.g. neo-Nazis) can use as a roadmap for a
future rampages against similar victims?
(6) The media should never publish a report on
suicide or murder-suicide without adding the
protective factors, such as the contact
information for hot lines, help lines, soft
lines, and other available community resources,
including email addresses, websites, and phone
numbers. To run a story on suicide or a gangland
murder without thinking about the damage the
story can do is simply not responsible. It¹s
like giving a child a loaded gun. The media
should try to balance such stories with some
concern and consideration for those who may use
it to imitate the act described.
(7) And finally, the media should reflect more
on their role in creating our increasingly
violent society. Honest reporting on the
positive nature of being alive in the
twenty-first century might actually decrease the
negative outcomes of the copycat effect, and
create a wave of self-awareness that this life
is rather good after all. Most of our lives are
mundane, safe, and uneventful. This is something
that an alien watching television news from
outer space, as they say, would never know. The
media should "get real," and try to use their
influence and the copycat effect to spread a
little peace, rather than mayhem.
* * *
The time has come for someone to say, Stop
it. Stop sensationalizing the violence. Stop
triggering violent behaviors now.
* * *
© Loren Coleman 2004. |
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