A Comparative Analysis of Media Coverage of Mass Public Shootings: Examining Rampage, Disgruntled Employee, School, and Lone-Wolf Terrorist Shootings in the United States

Abstract

This study provides a comparative analysis of news media coverage across four types of mass public shootings: rampage, disgruntled employee, school, and lone-wolf terrorist. This research analyzes the agenda-setting function of the media and identifies differences in coverage and the salience of coverage, proportionality of coverage, changes in coverage over time, and factors influencing levels of coverage. Findings indicate school shootings and lone-wolf terrorist shootings receive disproportionate amounts of news media coverage. This suggests media coverage may be contributing to setting the public and policy agenda concerning the phenomenon. These findings have important implications for public perceptions of risk, conceptualizations of potential perpetrators, and the implementation of security measures.

Disaggregating Mass Public Shootings: A Comparative Analysis of Disgruntled Employee, School, Ideologically motivated, and Rampage Shooters

“…Among all the individual‐ and event‐level characteristics that we have discussed, none get more attention than the human costs of these massacres . Our results suggest that while ideologically motivated offenders have the highest number of fatalities ( = 4.5) and injured victims ( = 6), there are no statistically significant differences among different types of offenders.…”

“…This finding is in direct contrast with the public attention given to these shooters. Silva and Capellan find, for example, that rampage and disgruntled employee offenders receive 15‐20% of total news coverage on mass public shootings. Conversely, school and terrorist offenders receive 75‐80% of all news coverage.…”

“…Consistent with most studies on the subject (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19), we employed an open-source data collection strategy to identify and collect information on both failed and successful mass public shootings that occurred in the United States from 1966 to 2017. Open-source data are information that is open to the public (20).…”

Mass Shooting Films: Myths, Academic Knowledge, and Popular Criminology

“…Columbine constructed the public's frame of reference for all future mass shootings and contributed to myths suggesting the quintessential perpetrator is young and White. This reflects academic knowledge of school shooters, but not the phenomenon at-large (Silva & Capellan, 2018a). When journalists are reporting on this type of almost inexplicable crime, it is easier to present what happened (Tuchman, 1978), and much more difficult to provide the complex motivations contributing to the incident.…”

Space between concern and crime

“…First, ongoing definitional debates regarding the minimum number of victims to qualify as a “mass” event (e.g., a three‐ or four‐victim threshold to qualify as a mass murder) can be avoided. Second, from a theoretical perspective, the pre‐attack behaviors and motivation(s) that underlie an attempt to kill more than one person in public are recognized as not necessarily related to the ability to accomplish that objective (Silva & Capellan, ).…”