Should media avoid naming the gunmen in mass shootings?

[Arkansas Granny]

A few months after teen shooters killed 12 classmates and her father at Columbine High School, Coni Sanders was standing in line at a grocery store with her young daughter when they came face to face with the magazine cover.

It showed the two gunmen who had carried out one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. Sanders realized that few people knew much about her father, who saved countless lives. But virtually everyone knew the names and the tiniest of details about the attackers who carried out the carnage.

In the decades since Columbine, a growing movement has urged news organizations to refrain from naming the shooters in mass slayings and to cease the steady drumbeat of biographical information about them. Critics say giving the assailants notoriety offers little to help understand the attacks and instead fuels celebrity-style coverage that only encourages future attacks.

The 1999 Colorado attack continues to motivate mass shooters, including the two men who this week stormed their former school in Brazil, killing seven people.

https://www.apnews.com/00f5376066b8473fa4e0a063d963e89e

[Shell_Seas]

1. No Noteriety

https://nonotoriety.com/

[Arkansas Granny]

3. That sounds like a very good idea to me. It seems some of the shootings are spurred by publicity.

I've noticed lately that PBS NewsHour has given names and faces to the victims of mass shootings here in the US, but not so much the killers. I don't know if other news outlets are following the same practice.

[happybird]

5. +1

[elleng]

2. Yes

[hlthe2b]

4. There is a difference in naming as a matter of public right to know/justice and sensationalizing.

Media should name, but then dramatically limit discussion of the perpetrators to the law enforcement findings, rather than personalizing the accused. The majority of coverage should be on the victims and their lives that truly mattered.

[lagomorph777]

6. I disagree. Label the shooter as a White Trash Terrorist and move on to dismantling the network.

...starting with the ringleader: Trump.

No need to let that garbage achieve the fame it desires.

[hlthe2b]

7. You misunderstand. There are legal reasons they must be identified unless underage.

we don't hide such information from the American public in this country.

[lagomorph777]

8. The media are legally required to name people?

WTF? No.

[hlthe2b]

9. Law Enforcement and the courts are required to release this information--it is public record.

The media's job is to report--not hide information from the public. They certainly can do so with discretion in terms of NOT sensationalizing, but if you want the MSM to hide information from the public, you'll be interested in Putin's Russia and what they are doing. Me? No damned way.

Link to tweet

[Midnight Writer]

10. I've said it before and I say it again. Publish total nude photos of them, mushroom parts and all.

And in the unlikely event they are hung like Dillinger, Photoshop in a Trump alike.

These fucks want to be tough, macho, respected guys.

So humiliate them.