The Fact of My Ignorance

Well its long been my position that the largest bias of the media is their bias towards the exciting, tantalizing, scandalous, lurid, and enraging.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the way that the media treats the actions of murderers who commit mass shootings.  I was reading an interesting article in MindHacks (an excellent psychology/neuroscience blog) the other day about this subject and with the immigration center shooting that happened in New York today, I thought this was an appropriate time to post something about it.

A very interesting video clip on this subject and a brief commentary can be found after the jump (which means after you click “continue reading” for my readers who are new to the blog culture)

This video is from a BBC show called Newswipe and contains a bit of commentary about a shooting in germany and an interesting perspective from a forensic psychologist at the end.  Please forgive the bleeped out cussing and sneering tone, it is a British show after all!  ;)

While we didn’t get much coverage of this particular tragedy in the US, it seemed to strongly parallel our national coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings last year.  I mean we were reading essays that he had written for his english class two years ago.  All of his personal webcam videos were broadcast day in and day out.  There were interviews with his family members and teachers.  It was horrible really.  There are thousands of bitter loners out there who feel like they should be famous but the world isn’t giving them a fair chance.  And they now see mass murder as a way to go down in history and make the world see that they shouldn’t have looked down on them.  They know that all they have to do is burst into their school/workplace/local mall and shoot up the place to get their face and story plastered all over cable news for the next several weeks.

But its a hard thing to stop.  Ultimately the news dwells on these details because its what their viewers want to see.  It appeals to our basest and most primal instincts.  Its kind of a modern form of Roman bloodsports.  If everyone else was showing the home videos of the Virginia Tech shooter and one news station refused to do it they’d get destroyed in the ratings.  They’d all have to make the responsible choice together and to do that successfully they’d need an atmosphere of mutual trust that is not even close to existing in the news industry.

It’s a manifestation of a classic economic and business quandary best represented by the famous “prisoner’s dilemma”. A situation in which the “invisible hand” fails to guide self-interested individuals to optimal results because of imperfect information and a breakdown of trust, instead leading all sides to mess themselves over in the long-run in the pursuit of short term goals.  And if modern game theory is correct, there’s really no good way to stop it.

ps – this will be my last post for a few days because it will be a busy weekend for me but i’ll be back with plenty more posts next week.

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