Mass shootings are rare but gain global media attention. Hear from Glynn Greensmith, a journalist and researcher, who discusses the media’s role and responsibility in covering mass shootings.
Mass shootings are rare, but these heineous crimes have become a magnet for global media attention. There are growing concerns the detailed coverage is leading to copycat and contagion killings. Recent research also shows a disturbing trend where shooters seek to publicise their beliefs and intentions through media platforms in an effort to gain notoriety and infamy.
In this episode, David speaks with journalist and Curtin University academic, Glynn Greensmith, who is currently researching the ways in which the media handles the reporting of mass shootings.
Mr Greensmith is a lecturer in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry. He has a background as a journalist, newsreader, producer and radio presenter and is the current host of ABC weekly show “It’s Just Not Cricket”.
Email thefutureof@curtin.edu.au.
Curtin University supports academic freedom of speech. The views expressed in The Future Of podcast may not reflect those of the university.
Music: OKAY by 13ounce Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 Music promoted by Audio Library
You can read the full transcript of the episode here.
Intro (00:01): This is The Future Of, where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping to shape it for the better.
David (00:10): I'm David Blayney. Mass shootings are rare, but these heinous crimes have been a magnet for global media attention. There are growing concerns that detailed coverage is leading to copycat and contagion killings. Recent research also shows a disturbing trend where shooters are seeking to publicise their beliefs and intentions through media platforms in an effort to gain notoriety and infamy. To discuss this topic with us today is journalist and Curtin researcher Glynn Greensmith. Thank you very much for coming in.
Glynn Greensmith (00:44): Yeah, really happy to be here, David, and thanks for asking. I think this is such a - I'm delighted that this is a subject that people want to talk about. Obviously I find it interesting, but I've found in my travels and experiences that this is a subject that people are connecting to more and more.
David (01:00): Glynn, what role does media coverage play when it comes to mass shootings?
Glynn Greensmith (01:06): Well, the simple answer is 'a role'. Absolutely. Unquestionably, indefinably a role. What role that is, we are seeking to learn. This is a journey that's been going on for some 50 years. When we first identified the moment that the link between mass shootings and media coverage began, we'd been charting it ever since. I'll tell you one of the funny things about being a journalism lecturer and researcher. If I said to you, if I said to anybody, that I think journalism is a massively under researched subject, I think that would get a few eyebrows, especially amongst academic circles. There's been about a gazillion subjects called media studies where we examine, you know, the semiotics of, of journalism, but we seem to have very spectacularly failed to really structurally understand journalism as a subject of research. And I think that is born out by the fact that certainly in Australian terms, I was the first journalism academic to look at the link between mass shootings and the role of the media. Whereas psychiatrists and criminologists and psychologists and public health officials, oh, they'd been talking about this for a while. So I think it's a really interesting aspect to that. There is so much for us to learn within the spectrum of what is journalism in the academy and what can we learn about it and what, therefore, can we do?
Glynn Greensmith (02:32): 1st of August 1966, University of Texas, a young man climbs a tower and kills lots of people. Mass shootings were very rare. Before that, the weaponry existed. Don't, don't get me wrong, the kind of guns that this guy had had been around for a while, but mass shootings happened every maybe four or five years. What happened after the university of Texas on the 1st of August, 1966 is that mass shootings went almost immediately to 15 a year. Almost immediately. And there they have stayed for the last 50 years. It was instantaneous and what happened on that day was, it was the very first time that the news - just organically - there was no predetermined plan - there's no such thing as the media really. It is incredibly disparate and diverse individuals working for different people in different outlets for different reasons, but there was a very specific way that crime was covered. It was covered in a way, and we call it the script. The script was written that day, where the coverage focused very much on who the killer was, how the crime was committed, and they sought very definitely to answer the question, why would someone do that - and what a reasonable and excellent question that is for journalists to seek - why has this happened is a really important part of the compact between us and the audience. But what they did was say, well, to answer the question why - because we don't really know - was let's look at everything we can find out about the killer. So we were bombarded with pictures of the killer as a child holding a rifle.
Glynn Greensmith (04:11): We were bombarded with speculation such as, well, we heard he was suffering some headaches and suddenly this whole guy's life was laid bare his whole life in an effort to understand why he might've done this. We said, let's find everything out about him that we can. And in that moment, mass shootings became a problem. And that script has not altered. All that's altered are the mechanisms. So in recent years we've seen killers have livestream videos of their crime, 500 page manifestos that are broadcast, that are published. We've seen one guy who filmed himself put it on YouTube and that YouTube video was played. I saw a shooting in 2016 where the guy, they put on CNN, a blog post he wrote saying, if you want to kill people, if you want to get on the news, you need to kill people. It seems the more people you kill, the more you're in the limelight. And they screenshotted that and put it on the news, which was the moment my brain exploded.
David (05:14): What a remarkable lack of self awareness.
Glynn Greensmith (05:16): It was extraordinary. And that - and when I tell you that they followed that - that immediately followed a press conference where the sheriff in charge of the case was saying, "I'm not going to say this guy's name. I think that's what he wanted. I refuse to say his name". Cut back to the studio. And they go, yeah, we're going to say his name. And they did. And then they said "Close to his mother. Liked to dress in army gear and wrote a blog post that said, if you want to get the limelight, the more people you kill, the more limelight". Like you get, ask anybody. That's, this is common sense now. Like, that's not some scientific worthy area of research. From a journalistic point of view, this is me shaking people and going, can we actually have a modicum of self-awareness here? The problem with my industry comes where people take it too far down the line and say, well, if I start agreeing with you, then you know, frogs are going to fall from the sky and rainbows will turn everyone gay and you go, hang on, can we deal with this one step at a time? And really from my point of view, that's been a large part of the fight from an industry perspective, but we are making headway because there are some really clever and sensitive human beings out there who want to do it right. But what I've noticed is that when I - and I take every opportunity I can to go out and talk about this in the public sphere - because the reaction is 1,000 per cent different. People shrug their shoulders and go, that makes absolute sense, Glynn. So the fight for this particular branch of knowledge is between the academy in the industry. But I find that people connect to it really quickly and really easily because it makes sense.
David (06:58): Why is the industry so much more, maybe hostile isn't the word, but so much more skeptical of this than the broader public.
Glynn Greensmith (07:06): Yeah, it's a really good question. And having said there's no such thing as the media, I should say, well, you know, what is the industry? As I said, a disparate, diverse group of people. I went and interviewed the journalists who covered the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 so I sat down with some surviving journalists and talked about the coverage and asked them a lot of questions about my research and how they would have responded. I said, what would you have said to me if I came into your newsroom in 1996 and said, please don't show his face. Please don't name him. You're gonna make a big difference if you don't. Pound to a penny, the answer I got is, "well, what difference does it make if the mob up the road does it?" And so journalism is kind of stuck in this endless vortex of a lack of community. So again, we say the media, but there's no such thing. And usually what stops them is if I say, "Hey, David, do the right thing". You'll say, yeah, well, well, if I do the right thing, Glynn won't and Glynn will make more money than me. He'll get more clicks, more ratings, you'll sell more papers. And so within certain sectors of the industry, particularly if you're a commercial industry who's relying on those things, then that becomes very problematic. That, and this is what I really, really respect about journalism and it is incredibly bloody minded and incredibly 'get your hands away from us' because they see any impact like that as akin to the government telling them what they can and can't write.
Glynn Greensmith (08:31): That is where I'm completely simpatico with the concerns and that's where I really try - and on that level - address those concerns. Because there is an inherent - as there should be - distaste in journalism for rules and regulations because it's only such a small step as we are seeing around the world right now. It is a small step to a noble idea being manipulated by a bad person for bad reasons, leading to very bad outcomes. So there is an inherent uneasiness within journalism, but I tend to find if I can look people in the eye and have a conversation with them and go through evidence that you tend to elicit some pretty reasonable responses. Obviously we're a long way, I think, from having the kind of recommendations I'm making become widespread. But I tell you that the last three or four years, the conversation has grown 1,000 per cent. So it is now something that almost every newsroom knows about and that's a win and some are now responding to, and that's a win.
David (09:36): You mentioned earlier the role that social media can have in terms of mass shootings. The Christchurch attack last year, that was in many respects, it was sort of made for social media. Did that event change the way that social media operates?
Glynn Greensmith (09:55): I don't think it has, but it certainly did something first. It did something far more fundamental. You can't have change until you ask for it. And the amount of people that have said to me, "So I've be making this argument about what is journalism. What does it for, what do we do? How does it impact the world if we make changes, how does it impact the world? What does best practice?" And people have nodded heads and sort of said, yeah, I'm not comfortable with that. If the mob hit the road ... et cetera, et cetera. And then social media came along and that's become a really easy rebuff to me. "Glynn, I am sympathetic to what you're saying, but in the era of social media and the internet, well isn't it all moot?" Which is not unreasonable.
David (10:41): Because in that sense the media are no longer the gatekeepers to information.
Glynn Greensmith (10:44): Not the arbiters or the gatekeepers or the controllers or the publishers, etc. I get that. Except social media is three minutes old. So firstly, as an academic or as a journalist and one of the first tenants, one of the ... the very first class in my first year, I say to my students to start thinking like a student of journalism, stop making assumptions. Stop taking stuff for granted. That is a ridiculous thing to do when you think about it, but you all do it. And we have some exercises where we think, what do we just assume? This is the way the world is? Because it should be? That's actually ridiculous when you think about it. So we go through that process. Please don't tell me that social media is the arbiter of truth and decency in our society. It arrived three minutes ago. It's a little baby and like all little babies, sometimes it needs to be put down for a nap and sometimes it should probably go to the naughty room. I'm making light of a really serious thing here. We, take our, you know, Facebook exists so therefore everything we do as professional, public interest based journalists is now - it doesn't matter? I'm not having that. Social media will change if we demand it. I believe that. And so what we're now starting to see and what I think that we started to see, particularly after the Christchurch shooting is, people started asking better questions. And, and let me tell you, from the standpoint of a lecturer of journalism, I assure you that that it's not about answers, it's about good questions. It's about the fundamental belief - often being challenged in our society more and more everyday to my great despair - but it's my fundamental belief that good questions lead to good answers and that we are responsible for the questions. Not the answers, not what people should think, not what people who people should vote for. But it is essential to democracy that the right questions are asked so that people are properly informed. What can we do about social media? That's the right question. I'm not saying it's easy, but let's be really clear that we've never asked it before. So let's not take it for granted. People have said to me - I happened across an interview I did on ABC television in 2017 after the worst mass shooting in US history - and one of the counter-arguments that was put to me was, well, why are we talking about this? It's only about guns. I was a little cranky for a couple of reasons. One, there are more guns in Australia right now than there were at the time of the Port Arthur massacre. So it's not just about guns. And I can, if anybody's interested, tell you why what happened journalistically after Port Arthur was perhaps as important as our removal of a lot of the guns from the public sphere.
Glynn Greensmith (13:34): But also, you know, a few years ago there was a massacre primary school called Sandy Hook. You all know this, right? They can't - if they can sit and watch that - and not act - then I'm not going to wait anymore. You know what they did after Sandy Hook? They showed they sold a shit ton more guns. That's what they did after Sandy Hook. Gun sales went through the roof after Sandy Hook. I'm done. Right? You fight for gun control all you want. I've got you an argument over here that I think can make a difference. Don't tell me I'm not supposed to because you're waiting for this insanity to cure itself. Miraculously. It's not going to. Why don't we try and do something? You know what I would try? Absolutely anything. That's what I would try rather than sit and watch that again.
David (14:31): We all know that the government was quite quick to act in getting rid of guns after the, or at least making it harder for us to get guns after Port Arthur. What happened to the industry - to the journalism industry - after Port Arthur? What changed about how they cover mass shootings?
Glynn Greensmith (14:50): Nothing.
David (14:51): Nothing.
Glynn Greensmith (14:51): Nothing. But - and this is the essence of - certainly from a foundational point of view - my thesis that began this journey, and obviously I deal a lot with the modern mass shootings, but the reason I use Port Arthur as a case study is that Port Arthur was covered really well and really ethically. And you know what else was covered really well and really ethically? Christchurch - by New Zealand media outlets. You know where it wasn't covered very ethically and very well? Here in Australia. Do you know what Australia doesn't cover very ethically and very well mass shootings that happened in other places. Do you know what New Zealand didn't cover very ethically and very well? Mass shootings that happened in other places. If you covered them like they were in your town, I'm telling you, I don't think they would be in your town. And that's the disconnect.
Glynn Greensmith (15:36): So in Tasmania they did a really wonderful job of covering Port Arthur. It was, it was human, it was decent, it was thorough. It was excellent. It was ethical on almost every level with a couple of mild exceptions. And there was a couple of reasons that it was ethical, not least the subdued as a element where once the perpetrator sort of - was named as the accused - the law demanded that the media was not allowed to speculate wildly about who they are and whether they did that crime. So there was a legal element there, which we shouldn't forget. There are plenty of checks and balances on journalism. We might come to that at some point, but there are plenty of checks and balances on journalism. The, the foundational elements of my research, and again, I cannot emphasise enough how surprised I am and how instructive I think it is that I was the first person in this field to look at this, is that there was a mass shooting in Scotland a month before at a primary school. Very, very sad mass shooting at a primary school in Scotland at a place called Dunblane. So I said, well, how was that covered in Tasmania? And went and had a look and no one had. And I, again, I say that not in any sort of way saying, look at me aren't I great. I'm saying I should not have been the first. I should not have been the first to look at that. And it was 2016 that I did that, 20 years after it happened. It was crying out for that link to be made. How was that covered? And it was covered differently. It was covered very differently. The focus was all on the perpetrator. So, what did the killer see? What did he hear and what did he read? He read a mass shooter everywhere. This, this demon across the front pages of the paper on the television screens. So he went, and I have spoken to the psychiatrist to provide the, the court report on his mental state, to the person who sat next to him when he was in his hospital bed and said, I want to understand why you did what you did.
Glynn Greensmith (17:47): And he is in complete agreement. This field, he's written so much in this - again, an example of people from outside journalism who've been talking about this. An excellent retired economical professor, Paul Mullen, a forensic psychiatrist. He said that the perpetrator of Port Arthur was suicidal and something switched him to homicidal and suicidal. As all mass shooters intend to die. And he did, but failed. What changed? Oh, there was a mass shooting a month before. Let's look at how it was covered. If we think that if that shooting from Scotland had been covered the same way with the sensitivity and ethical boundaries that they covered the one on their front doorstep, I'm reasonably firm in the belief there wouldn't have been a Port Arthur.
David (18:32): Could you elaborate on the differences between how media covers a local shooting versus one which happens elsewhere?
Glynn Greensmith (18:45): All journalism is local in a sense, and I certainly think in our hyperconnected world, we should probably realise that all journalism is local. But what's really beautiful about local journalism still in this day and age is it's answerable to its community so that there isn't an instantaneous check and balance to the way that things are reported in local papers, local radio stations, local TV stations. And when there is a crime of the magnitude of Christchurch, you can imagine what would have happened if there'd been a massive sensationalist rush on the ground in New Zealand to have some glory party about the demon killer. We gotta be really clear about the difference between fame and infamy. I mean pretty blurred lines in 2020, but any, you know, the objective being they don't care if you're calling them a monster, they just want, they care that you're calling them.
Glynn Greensmith (19:39): And so you can imagine what that backlash would have been like. You can imagine how that community would have responded. It would have been similar to what happened in Hobart and Tasmania in 1996 where the community, absolutely - I was told by one of the editorial team from The Mercury in Hobart, you know, which was covering this - that their phone ran hot when they did publish information about the killer. He said, I don't think I've ever received as many phone calls saying, you know, get this guy off, like, 'F' this guy. Get him off the front page. How dare we put this man out there. In that sense, there was a revulsion, and it ties into your previous question. What we did with the killer of Port Arthur is, we made him reviled and pathetic and risible, and that had a dramatic effect, I think, on our relationship with the mass shooter here in Australia. What worries me now is that we make mass shooters glorious. That we treated the perpetrator of, of Christchurch like he was a foreigner. Instead of saying, actually we grew that guy, we exported that murderer. So can we be really cognisant of that? Can we be really ethical in the way that we approach it? We weren't. We treated it like it was a foreign killing. And we splurged in sensationalism in quite a lot of places in a way that we would not have done had it been on our doorstep. Stream of consciousness, so if I'm not answering the question ...
David (21:06): No, no, no, that's ... So how do we make journalists more wary of those sensitivities when they're covering an event, which, when they're not having that sort of local reaction to their unethical coverage?
Glynn Greensmith (21:22): We have rules in journalism. We have lots of rules. I do not get to go on my radio show and swear profusely much as I think it would be a better radio show if they let me on the ABC, we have rules about how we report suicide, how we report sexual assault, how we report anything to do with a minor, somebody under the age of 18, there are rules aplenty. So I think we just need to get comfortable with the idea that we already exist in that world and that this is merely adding to that canon, because within those rules are the boundaries that affect all news outlets. And therefore we can mitigate the concern that a lot of people have of, what's the point of me doing it right if the mob up the road are going to do it wrong. I think there needs to be better ... the regulation that exists, the consequences that exist, for doing it wrong need to be a little better in our country. I don't think they're as robust as they are supposed to be. And of course, having said that, we're hyperconnected, you know, could I ask you to do it right in your news outlet? And you say yes. And everyone in Australia says yes, but everyone in America does it terribly and I just click onto them.
Glynn Greensmith (22:32): So we, we, we have some challenges around that. But I'm very much of the belief that if, you know, if you build it, they will come. That if we gi,ve an example to follow that people might follow it. That if we understand that this is, that genuinely we can save lives in a way that other areas of public policy are not, then I think if we can manufacture something along those lines and we can see the impact it's having, then people will get onboard.
David (23:02): How does covering a mass shooting affect the journalists themselves?
Glynn Greensmith (23:07): Yeah, that's a, that's such a good question. I interviewed a cameraman who from Tasmania who quit about two weeks later and has never gone back because he couldn't handle it.
David (23:23): He couldn't handle going back to work or to Tasmania?
Glynn Greensmith (23:25): He's never got back to, to being a camera man in the media. And I should clarify when I say he couldn't handle it, that's not in a disparaging way. What I mean was, he talked to me about - I was talking to you about - local, you know, versus international. Well, it applies in a country as big as Australia. What happened in Tasmania is that a lot of journalists came in from Sydney and Melbourne. The big newsroom sent their big guns down. And for people on the ground there were, there were instances where they might be on a bus, for example, like, the police would provide a bus to take all of the media to a particular location so that they could do their work. And he described to me the dark humour that can often pervade these situations, which is, as we know, for a lot of people in a lot of industries, a coping mechanism. This is really sad, so I'm going to make some inappropriate jokes. And you can imagine that back in 1996. I think it would still happen today, but I imagine maybe a little bit less. Those jokes really affected him. To be in that situation where he said, this is my, my home, these are my people. And to hear you laugh? It changed something within him. I would suggest to you that that is also under the realms of pretty common sense. I would suggest to you that there's some - if that didn't affect you - you would have more to be concerned about. So does it impact the people on the ground? Absolutely it does. What's interesting to me is to probably take that a couple of steps back. And particularly to us here in the university environment, I think that the idea of telling stories for living - the idea of the news and what's going on outside this window today, wherever you are, wherever you're listening, click on a news website.
Glynn Greensmith (25:17): Oh look, isn't that terrible? Well somebody's telling you about that. And they probably think it's terrible too. I think one of the fundamental words, we don't use enough when, when we imagine the study of journalism and the practice of journalism, is impact. Impact is why I do what I do. I love what I do. And that impact is invariably positive until it's not. And as such, I have begun teaching - for several years now - the idea of trauma at university and we are seeing a real - much like mass shootings - there's been a real international shift in journalism academia to want to, understanding trauma in journalism and teaching it better. I go a step further and say, well, you tell stories while you are at university. Therefore you need to understand that now, because impact, as soon as you tell stories for a living, you will get impact mostly good.
Glynn Greensmith (26:12): And then sometimes it won't be, and when it's not, that can be really serious. So a understanding of covering mass shootings is no different than our understanding of covering a court case or, or the police. You know, if you cover an apologies for, you know, we're talking about murder, so I shouldn't worry about talking about rape. But you know, I remember the first time I covered a rape story, I cried. You know? And I went home and I cried and I went, how was I not prepared for that? It was a ... the only way I can describe it was it was a fairly normal sort of crime in that way. It was not an exceptional one in the great statistical scheme of things. But it's the first time I'd sat on a microphone talking to a police sergeant, who was crying, describe the details to me and I went home and went, I don't know if I can do this.
Glynn Greensmith (27:01): And I was angry that I was unprepared for that. I was in a professional newsroom. How is this a surprise that I'm reacting like this? And then I quickly, luckily, went, well it'd be weird if I didn't react like this. So let's think about that. That's now what we teach. In fact, I'm planning to be at an international conference in the UK in May because there's been such an interesting upsurge in the idea of teaching trauma at university. And one of the things I'm very passionate about is to say that it's about teaching impact and trauma is just one version of that. And it's about teaching it at university for university because to study journalism at university is one of the most interesting - I can't think of a more interesting subject in 2020. Whether you want to be a journalist or not is actually incidental to me. If you come to university and you learn about journalism and all the associated things you're getting smarter. If you tell stories at university, you're going to be impacted. So we need to talk to you about it, not just about being in a war zone or at a mass shooting. It could be at the most statistically banal thing, but the world is full of impact and we are on the frontline of that, because we are asked to be there on the ground looking in the eyes of the people that are suffering or dying, taking the pictures or recording the sounds. How could you not be impacted? It is for the most, it is one of the great reasons to do this, to tell stories for a living.
David (28:35): And I think we'll leave it there. Thank you very much, Glynnn, for coming in to share your knowledge on this.
Glynn Greensmith (28:39): Thanks very much for having me.
David (28:41): You've been listening to The Future Of, a podcast powered by Curtin University. If you have any questions about anything we've discussed today, please get in touch by following the links in the show notes.