Consumed by the Media

It has happened so many times I can't keep count anymore. Large-scale shootings, whether they are at schools, malls or on the street, happen almost as frequently as I visit the barbershop. The most recent one that obviously prompted the creation of this article was that enacted by Elliot Rodger. Yes, I know his full name. In fact, I also happen to know that he was twenty-two years old, died a virgin and was the son of the Hunger Games assistant director. For those of you uninformed of the incident, Elliot Rodger was the perpetrator of a six death shooting on the Santa Barbara campus.But that's not all I know about him and others like him.In bold, large letters often supplied with black shadowing, the age, address and personal details of the killer have been listed. These are often followed by blurry footage from mobile phones, a map of the location that the killer performed his murders and more recently, 3-D simulations of how the killings would have taken place. This is all seen by millions of Americans eating their dinner and watching television, with twenty-four hour coverage.Like vultures, the media dives. Any scrap, any last piece of meat, it's all theirs. Is it a video of him at the science fair? Show it. Did he enjoy playing video games that involved deleting things? Talk about it. Is it a picture in which you can see his left arm? Show it and tell us how unsocial, how disconnected from reality and how isolated he was.All of this sits under the banner of what we label as news in today's United States. Many of us here at Exeter don't watch television, but the conversations we have are often centered around online media. Students are the only ones subjected to this kind of sensationalizing. One of my close friends chuckled to me the other day, telling me that in one of his classes, the teacher had decided to talk about Donald Sterling and his bout with racism. Perpetuated by other fellow students who had garnered equal interest, the discussion continued for the first twenty minutes of class before the teacher brought them back together.Their discussion, and many others I hear every day, did not focus on the thousands drowning in Balkan floods, or the importance of Memorial Day, but on one single man named Donald Sterling who's bit of racism allowed certain students to learn his age, the name of his girlfriend, where he lived and what he wore to country club breakfasts.Donald Sterling is only one example. But if that's what the media expects to be real news, then we can only expect them to devote countless hours to a shooting which at the most has impacted only the nearby community directly. The real problem is that this person's name is known, throughout the entire world. We can't remember the names of Nobel Prize winners, but we can remember the names of people who bought handguns from shops for a few hundred dollars and ended several innocent lives. What we need to do is seek an end to propagation, an end to sensitization. But let’s be honest, that's not happening any time soon.Don't get me wrong, racism is an extremely important issue and continues to plague our nation as it has done for decades. But you'll never see the hundreds of suicides that occur every month reported on TV, each and every one of which is just as important as a shooting or a single man's racism. I'm sure the reasons for said exclusion are clear to you know. It's amazing what the capital letters "BREAKING NEWS" can do to a person. Even I'm guilty—I caught myself immersed in the Malaysian Flight disappearance for a few days because of sensationalist headlines and my best friend CNN, who reported on it for over three weeks.Just like the repeated showing of a passenger flight airplane, I found the face of Elliot Rodger on every news article at the very top. It was placed mostly above the titles, sometimes off to the side, as if his face somehow had to do with his actions. But hey, at least we know what the killer looks like right?That's exactly what Elliot Rodger is turning into. A face smashed across news, exuberating, sensational, glorious—a pin-up boy. On millions of screens, with each and every American, including me, hungrily devouring it. Across the nation, every person who tunes into CNN or NBC sees these images, as if we assume that a third grader living in Maine will and must be impacted by a shooting that has occurred at a west coast university. How many did he kill? How many did he injure? What did he look like?Well, now we know. ​