John Curley


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Lt. J. Paul Vance of the Connecticut State Police is surrounded by reporters as he hands out the list of victims of the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Does media fuel deadly thinking?

BY John Curley  on December 18, 2012 @ 10:06 am (Updated: 10:15 am - 12/18/12 )

The 24-hour news cycle is in the business of selling you crappy fleece blankets and grill masters, so you can make more thoroughly toasted sandwiches. They're not really in the business of news. They are in the business of selling you crap. So, they need to have you watch and they need to have you watch continuously.

In between the crap that they are selling you, they just keep digging deeper, and deeper, and deeper into the wound. It destroys, it darkens, and it blackens the soul of the individual that sits in front of it for a long period of time.

I think that the 24-hour news cycle bears some responsibility to the damaged psyches of people who watch these sorts of things and then decide that they are going to go out there and replicate the same kind of thing that happens in places like Newtown and Columbine.

The murder-suicide is a new phenomenon in that the person says to themselves, 'I don't matter in this world. I am one of billions of people and I have two friends on Facebook and everyone else is popular. I don't exist. I am a ghost. But before I put this gun to my head and take my life, I'm going to make sure that people know who I am, that people know my name. So that someone can Google me and find out that I did something, not whether it was great, infamous or famous, but I mattered because I affected someone's life in some way.'

The 24-hour news cycle fuels that kind of thinking. Then you throw in the element of mental illness and the outcome is 'before I kill myself, I'm going to put that gun to as many innocent lives as possible so that my life means something before it ends.'

I hate to say this, and I hope I am wrong, but I believe we will see this happen again before the year is out.

John Curley, KIRO Radio Talk Show Host
John Curley is the host of Seattle's Morning News with John Curley on KIRO Radio, heard weekdays from 5 to 9 a.m.
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  • PerenialLosersMs wrote...
    The media focuses on the wrong people.
    December 19, 2012 6:11 am
    Kudos to MSN.com for having an article yesterday that showed the victims of this atrocity. With the permission of the families, these are the people that we should be shown over and over so that they are not forgotten. The murderer should not be mentioned by anything more than being that, the murderer. Just think about how many of the victims faces from Colorado you can visualize compared to the murderer. The media plastered his picture everywhere for months, but we only heard bits and pieces about the victims. Likewise, don't tell us his life story ad nauseum. Tell us about who the victims were. Even if the media won't admit it, their focus on the wrong side of the crime encourages more of the same. All this being said, we cannot solely blame the media. Responsibility rests in our hands as well. Turn it off! Then they will learn that this trash is not acceptable by our society.
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