No Name, No Face, No Nothing”: Representations of Perpetrators in Mass Shooting Coverage

Haynes, Anna

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

No Name, No Face, No Nothing”: Representations of Perpetrators in Mass Shooting Coverage Public Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/08612p77d

Abstract

On March 22, 2021, a gunman entered a King Soopers supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, with a semi-automatic rifle and fatally shot 10 people. Within the following days, as a witness to the beginning of the attack, I was interviewed by many news outlets ranging from local to international. Before police identified him, the questions journalists asked me primarily centered on my description of the shooter. After the shooter had been identified, local coverage appeared to significantly shift to honoring and remembering the victims of the shooting before shifting back to the shooter during legal hearings, while national coverage disappeared. As a journalist, I understand the newsworthiness of the shooter’s trial proceedings; as a witness to his crimes and a member of the impacted community, I resent repeatedly seeing his name and his image and feel like I see fewer stories about the lives of the victims and survivors. Experiencing intimately how journalists approach mass shootings and how my community was upended by the King Soopers shooting reignited a curiosity I’ve long held about how journalists speak about perpetrators when covering mass shootings. Specifically, I want to explore the common question of whether news coverage of mass shooters does more harm than good. The Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics advises journalists to minimize harm, while The Elements of Journalism by authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel states that "journalism's first obligation is to the truth." This project investigates how media outlets in Colorado have reported on perpetrators of mass shootings and how journalists can find the best balance between minimizing harm to traumatized communities and fulfilling their duty to inform citizens following a mass shooting.

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