The horror of the shooting in the Sandy Hook Elementary
School in Newtown, Conn., is the only thing that’s real as this is
written, less than four hours after the news of the tragedy broke. There
soon will be many savants commenting on what we can learn in this
country about violence, gun control, police response, heroes and the
innocent dead. We can’t claim to add anything real to those discussions.
We don’t know anything, although we fervently hope that this tragedy
gets no closer to our community than the television screen, the Facebook
feed and the newspaper headlines.
But it’s impossible not to note the behavior of the media, and we can
predict with some certainty where some of the coverage will go—we’ve
seen it before. The media inveigle the American news consumer with
misstatements about the danger in schools, about the necessity of new
restrictions on gun ownership, and about how one political party or the
other is the root cause of this violence. How many times will the
initials NRA come up in upcoming weeks? Oh wait, it looks like the media
is leaning toward attributing this mass murder to violent video games.
We can predict that the media will continue to inform us with incorrect
“facts,” which may eventually become the true legend of the Sandy Hook
shooting, and may eventually lead to bad legislation.
Whatever happened to the days when it was more important for
reporters to be right than first? As the coverage progressed this
morning, the number of errors presented as facts by the media has been
incalculable.
First, in the matter of the dead and wounded, numbers started at zero
killed and worked their way to 27 killed, then back to 26. The wounded,
too, varied wildly in number and still hasn’t settled. Misinformation
in the effort to be the first to break the news is utterly
irresponsible.
Even at this moment, we don’t know who the shooter was. Many news
outlets first reported that 24-year-old Ryan Lanza was the shooter. The
media even told us he was in police custody and being questioned. Except
that other “news” sources were telling us the killer was dead. Ryan
Lanza’s image, stolen from his Facebook page, was blasted all over the
internet. The fact is, in those traumatic, formative moments, this
became the face of the killer of that kindergarten class. (Turns out
they were first graders.)
He wasn’t the killer. Right now, it appears he is the killer’s older
brother, and the media is telling us that Adam Lanza, 20, is the real
killer. But the media has been so wrong, so quickly, that we can’t say
whether he was or not. Or if he’s dead. Or if he’s dead by his own hand.
One thing we know to be true does not appear in any of the headlines:
A mentally ill person proved that he or she did not get necessary help.
Will this massacre result in heightened security in schools?
Probably. Will the NRA get part of the blame for this catastrophe?
Probably. Will the media continue to get crucial facts wrong in the
reporting of this? Probably. Will our nation take up the fact that
mental illness is ignored by us as a culture to the detriment of our
children?
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