I keep seeing posts from people who are outraged at the news coverage of the Connecticut school shooting. People complain that the topic is being spammed everywhere, missing the irony that their last 6 Facebook posts were about the incident. Even worse, Morgan Freeman is freely quoted as being a genius who claims the news is making heroes out of the killers and shouldn’t be plastering their names everywhere, which only serves to convince others to do the same and become infamous. For one, attributing Freeman to that quote was a hoax and the whole thing never happened. Even if it did, that wasn’t the actor being a genius- whoever wrote the quote is just a person echoing what every serial killer expert and crime behavior analyst has said over the past 50 years.
So is there some truth to it? Is the media behaving irresponsibly? Yes, and perhaps. I’m surely not defending them. But what the majority of the people don’t understand is that traditional news is a platform for old people to be outraged. Kids aren’t tuned in to Fox News watching this story unfold. You know who is? Parents who grew up without the internet who can’t believe how different the world is today. You know why you are saturated by this coverage? Because you choose to be. Who in their right mind bitches about a tv show and keeps watching it? You are part of the problem. If you don’t want to be inundated with sensationalist media, don’t give it views or clicks.