Let's stop giving murderers the publicity they'd kill for

Stanley Crouch of the NY Daily News supports the Patriots claim that the television news media parasites are facilitating mass murders.

Please read his article below.

Monday, December 10th 2007, 4:00 AM

As the carnival of unexpected murder and violence continues to appear as though it is a series of specials on television news, heads of media organizations might consider changing the coverage of mass murders. Do we actually need to know or learn much more about "the mind of a killer" or what happened in his early life?

I think not. I agree with the relative of one of the people killed in the Columbine shootings who said that too much attention is given to the killers and not enough to the people who are killed.

The Virginia Tech loon who sent photographs and videotapes of himself to NBC clearly planned to blast his way into fame. He wanted to be remembered and thought all of this out before cutting himself down at the end of his meaningless hill of murders. Actually, for him, the killings had a big meaning: making a very sick man part of the celebrity culture in which we find ourselves trapped. If you don't have talent, well, you can kill. That will bring the cameras and the discussion.

Last week, a gunman killed eight people before committing suicide in an Omaha shopping mall. "Now I will be famous," the killer wrote in a suicide note, his landlady told CNN.

All of us have seen too many of these media profiles of killers as though they are actually interesting or mysteriously ominous characters. They aren't. Having known far more criminals over my life than I have needed to, I have learned that they are dull. And when they are not dull they suffer from the worst extreme of arrested development.

Meaning what?

Changing children from small narcissistic animals is difficult but simple. It comes down to teaching them the meaning and importance of compassion and empathy. The world is not here to respond to you, and torturing others hurts them - even if the venting of your anger provides a momentary feeling of release and justification.

Unlike criminals and mass murderers, children develop into human beings when they learn that others do not enjoy the pain that they have caused them anymore than the children themselves would. Simple, but profound. One of the reasons children learn this is guilt.

These very simple and basic things do not communicate as well as they might in our ongoing "me generation," as Tom Wolfe rightly called it more than 20 years ago. Wolfe probably thought that he had recognized what was no more than a passing trend of overheated narcissism. If so, he was wrong.

Perhaps the most threatening individual version of this overheated narcissism is the mass murderer. He is the man lost or hidden by the crowd, but he will not put up with it any longer. He has decided that his unhappiness is more important in its pain than the lives of anonymous others.

But, most of all, killing as many as possible will draw him the attention he never got and people will, perhaps, come to "understand" the depth of his anger or how much his failure meant as it transformed itself into the acid of absolute hostility within his mortal coil.

All of this adds up to a considerable challenge for the media, but not one beyond its capability. If the media had the courage and developed the narrative skills to make the lives of the victims more important and more compelling in their humanity than the crabbed and tortured lives of their murderers, the attention would give the killers far less space than the victims.

Imagine if it saved lives beyond the killer himself. He might then only do away with one person. We would then be spared the body bags filled with those whom he had planned to sacrifice on the altar of television.

DailyNews.com