The San Diego mosque shooting earlier this week largely disappeared from national media coverage once the manifesto of the two teenage perpetrators became public, revealing motivations rooted in antisemitism and incel ideology rather than anything that fit the preferred political narrative. The episode illustrated both how quickly these events are sensationalized for political purposes and how poorly the media’s coverage habits serve the public interest.
Michael Golden, author of Unlock Congress and writer of the Golden Mean column on Substack, recently published a piece titled Neuter the Shooters: What the Media Can Do to Save Lives, and joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to make the case for a fundamental change in how news organizations cover mass killings.
Golden’s argument is grounded in research rather than sentiment. A 2017 study by criminologists Lankford and Madfis, whose explicit recommendation was don’t name them, don’t show them, but report everything else, examined the psychology of mass killers and found consistent patterns of advance planning oriented specifically around achieving notoriety, with perpetrators frequently leaving manifestos, dropping off materials at media stations before acting, and in some cases keeping spreadsheets tracking kill counts and media coverage of previous attacks to understand what level of violence would be required to achieve maximum attention. He said the line between the mass killer’s motive and the media’s decision to name and extensively cover them is not circuitous. It is straight.
He said Tom Teves, whose son Alex was killed protecting his girlfriend during the 2012 Aurora theater shooting, started an organization called No Notoriety after watching the saturation media coverage celebrate the killer who murdered his heroic son while Alex’s story received almost nothing. The No Notoriety protocol has three components: minimize use of the perpetrator’s name and image, use an insulting and belittling rather than neutral or clinical characterization of the person, and report the facts surrounding the mindset, demographic, and motivational profile without adding any complimentary color to the individual. He said the protocol does explicitly carve out an exception when a suspect is at large and the community needs information to assist law enforcement.
Golden said if he could get the executive producers of the dozen or so major media organizations into a room and reach an agreement, he would push for a standardized, deliberately contemptuous single sentence describing every perpetrator as an ill, lonely, pathetic individual who should have been in psychiatric care, making clear to anyone contemplating a similar act that the only thing they will receive from the media is public humiliation rather than the infamy they are seeking. He said this is not complicated, is not going to materially harm any news organization’s bottom line once agreed to collectively, and would actually represent a genuine public relations win for a media industry that is criticized from every direction every day.
Proft raised the Chicago Tribune’s historical policy of not publishing the names of people who committed suicide, a practice grounded in research showing it increases copycat behavior among isolated individuals who see expressions of public grief and attention as something their own deaths might generate. Golden said it is directly analogous, and that the mechanism is the same: people in desperate, isolated, often mentally ill states see a model behavior that appears to deliver the recognition their lives have failed to provide.
He acknowledged that even if major media organizations agreed to the protocol, determined individuals could still find names through deep internet searches or fringe platforms. But he said the major media entities set the informational and emotional tone that shapes how hundreds of millions of people process these events, and that removing the name and framing from that tier of coverage would substantially reduce the cultural incentive structure that is currently rewarding perpetrators with exactly what they want.
He and Proft agreed on a second failure that compounds the first, which is that the same media organizations that sensationalize the perpetrator routinely suppress or distort the contextual information that would actually be useful, namely how a person was radicalized, what warning signs preceded the act, and what interventions might have changed the trajectory. He said presenting that information clearly and without political filtering serves the genuine public interest by giving families and communities tools to recognize similar patterns before the next act occurs, which is the actual journalistic function being abandoned in favor of saturation coverage of the killer’s name and image.