 The mayor of Uvalde, Texas announced recently that Rob elementary school would be demolished. You can never ask a child to go back or a teacher to go back in that school, ever, he said. What happened in Uvalde was a gruesome tragedy that exposes some of American culture's worst pathologies, a fixation on guns and violence, untreated mental illness, large swaths of alienated and angry young men, incompetent and unaccountable police. The media went looking for solutions. What if we could keep guns out of the wrong hands or get the right people medicated or reform the police or fix what's plaguing angry young men? All legitimate questions. But what the media rarely asks is, are we part of the problem? A growing body of research says yes. This is learned behavior and the media coverage is leading more people to learn it and to copy it. University of Alabama criminologist, Adam Langford has studied mass killers for more than a decade and concluded, along with many other scholars, that the way the media covers mass shootings incentivizes more mass shootings and for the killers to create as high a body count as possible. He says fame seeking is a motivation he's consistently observed across the majority of mass shooters. The more victims they kill, the more fame and attention they get. We've seen that in the United States mass shootings have become more deadly over time and it seems to be directly related to this. There seems to be too much demand for fame in America, Langford writes, and not enough supply. We see people posting videos and outrageous statements to get attention. Mass killings is just the most extreme version of this where people aren't just being offensive or outrageous to get attention and they know this works. Essentially, this is guaranteeing them fame and celebrity status. One of Langford's studies found that winning a Super Bowl or Academy Award garnered less media attention than committing a high profile mass killing. Perpetrators get pictured more on front pages than their individual victims. And there's a strong correlation between the number of victims harmed in these attacks and the amount of media attention that perpetrators receive. So the media is rewarding this and of course, you know, you can think about why do they do that. I think part of it is clickbait, essentially. What was some of the most striking evidence to you that seeking this fame and going out in a blaze of glory was really a common motivation for mass killers? The Columbine killers wanted to kill 250 people. That was their goal. And although they didn't kill as many victims as they wanted, they were talking about how movies would be made about them and they were talking about whether Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino would be directing, right? Certainly movies were made about them and they've received a tremendous amount of attention. And then we know from connecting the dots that subsequent shooters have considered the Columbine killers to be role models. Of all the incidents that have happened that inspired copycats, Columbine seems to be the one that stands out as inspiring the most. You know, also I guess if we just think about the historical context, 24-7 cable news was kind of coming into the forefront at that point, right? So there was a lot of desire to fill time on TV by covering current events and this was a big one, right? But some studies suggest that Columbine received more attention than major U.S. military events and incursions and things like that. In other words, it received an outsized amount of attention given that, as tragic as it was, it was relatively limited in terms of the actual number of victims killed. And yet, its actual influence has been inflated and prompted by the media coverage it received. Lankford's 2019 study found that at least 16 mass shooters since Columbine have voiced fame or notoriety as a motive and that the fame seekers tend to have more than double the body counts and many articulated a desire to surpass past records. Many of these mass shooters don't particularly have any sort of empathy for their victims and they're willing to kill. They're using their victims as the means to an end and that end is fame and what they would consider glory. In 2007, Virginia Tech was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. And then in 2016, the Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. And then a year later, in 2017, the Las Vegas mass shooting was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, right? We see these kind of terrible records being set and reset and since Columbine, all eight of the most lethal or deadliest mass shootings have been committed by fame seekers. It's not just Lankford saying this. A 2017 FBI report says the dominance of 24-7 media coverage perpetuates the mass shooting phenomenon and allows it to grow and evolve and suggests news media should refrain from naming the assailants from posting their photographs, videos and communications and from publishing detailed investigations into their lives and motives. More than a hundred researchers have joined Lankford in signing onto the don't name them movement petition which asks major media to adopt new norms for covering mass killings. Nobody looks at the face of the most recent mass shooter and thinks, oh, now that I see what he looks like, I know how to stop these attacks more effectively. Sometimes you have a trial of a mass shooter, you know, a year later or sentencing period and the pictures and the names are continued to be used in the coverage when it's no longer news. And so I guess I just point to kind of the thoughtless use of this information as clickbait. I just want to be perfectly clear that from my understanding of this letter that you and your colleagues have put out or this call to action, you're not calling for any sort of government intervention in terms of limiting the right of the media to publish a certain information. This is all norms and voluntary action, correct? Right, in other words, I guess we'd like to encourage or if it came down to it to shame these companies into acting in a more socially responsible way that protects public health. We're not saying the government should formally restrict this information. Again, I don't think that's possible. It could lead to even more mistrust of government. Look, the people who work for media companies, they don't want to see more people die. I think they just need to look a little more closely at the evidence and take a look in the mirror and say, can I make this problem slightly less serious based on my own actions? There's a couple of objections that come to mind for me that I'd like to be curious to hear your answer to. One is that when I think of the idea of media curtailing coverage in certain ways, like not showing people's faces or their names or going into their motivations and manifestos, one is that the information will get out there on less reputable sites. We're in the digital age now, so now more than ever, the information's going to get out there. You're generating maybe something approximating a black market in information, and that's where disinformation thrives and perhaps even creates even more of a taboo, maybe in some deranged way, even a more romantic aura around these guys. How can we avoid that? So I think it's a good point. In other words, like I'm under no kind of delusion that disinformation won't get out in some ways. I guess what I would just say is the degree of attention matters. In other words, it's not binary, it's not either that information is completely kept silent or it's totally out there. Less coverage is meaningful, right? We're not going to cut out all coverage, but if we don't give these mass shooters Super Bowl-type advertising for the terrible things they do and just have it more restrained, that in itself would make a difference. Suppressing any kind of information could lead us to missing some kind of important pattern or clue that could prevent the next one of these from happening. What if there was a series of connected ideological killings that we don't fully understand because there's kind of like a media blackout on covering the full extent of what's going on here? Don't limit any information about warning signs or backgrounds, that's all very important and needs to be discussed and needs to be analyzed carefully. Just keep in mind that the face itself is not useful and there are other ways to refer to someone and have everybody know who you're talking about based on the date of the event and the location of the event without really giving that person's name the attention that he craved as part of his decision to attack. Is there a sense that this is really something that is going to take years, maybe decades, to see some sort of effect reversing? Well, I guess it just depends on how dramatic the change or the intervention is, right? So if major media organizations change their processes in subtle ways and don't tell anyone about it, then I don't expect mass shooters to change what they're doing at all, right? The best thing would be if major media companies came out and said, we're no longer gonna publish the names or faces of mass shooters and then the next time a mass shooting happens which it will, they stuck to that, right? That would send a powerful message and the mass shooters, I think, would start to learn that they can't be rewarded in the way they were in the past. Just searching some of the recent killer's names on some of the major media site will show you that these measures are far from being the norm today, but have you seen any signs of progress or recent hope for improvement in recent years or are you pessimistic about any near-term change? It's a great question. One of the things I've seen which was a little disturbing is some members of the media kind of patting themselves on the back as if mission accomplished, we've already changed how the media coverage mass shootings and I don't think that's the case. One thing that has been a change is I think you've seen more attention given to the victims of mass shootings, but that doesn't fix the problem. In other words, doing something good on the one hand doesn't mean that the other things you're doing that are dangerous are any less dangerous. There are more media companies than ever before. There's kind of more competition for media companies for high balls. It's not like we just have three news stations and a couple of major newspapers or things like that. And unfortunately, the pressure felt by members of the media because of the competition that they're involved in sometimes seems to be leading them to resist change even if there's lots of evidence suggesting it would be the right thing to do. Many of us know the names of the Columbine shooters and the names of many other killers. How many victims' names do you remember? Or how about this name? Elijah Dickon. Do you know Elijah Dickon? I'm about to show you some of his work and I wanna give you fair warning. Skip ahead about 15 seconds if you don't wanna see something quite gory and disturbing. Okay, ready? That's what's left of a murderer whom Dickon gunned down in a shopping mall after he'd killed three innocents. Many more people would have died if Dickon hadn't intervened, said the local police chief. If more angry young men thinking about doing something horrible saw pictures like that instead of mug shots or old school photos, would they maybe think twice before going on shooting sprees? Demolishing the school building where this tragedy occurred won't do anything to stop it from happening again. But burying the legacies of the men responsible for such atrocities just might help.