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Media’s Boiled Frog Effect
I was watching The Today Show this morning as I raced around getting ready for work and was struck by what I saw…or should I say didn’t see. Yesterday, a gunman walked into a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University and shot 21 people, killing six, and then shot and killed himself. It was an absolutely horrific event, but that’s not what stopped me in my tracks. The interesting thing is that it wasn’t the lead story in the first half hour of The Today Show. The producers chose to lead with a story about Hillary Clinton and whether she could realistically and statistically catch up from a delegate count perspective. The other thing that is very surprising to me was that neither Matt Lauer nor Meredith Vieira was reporting live from the school.
On April 16th of last year when a lone gunman killed 32 people and wounded many more at Virginia Tech, the news media swarmed the campus and reported live onsite for weeks. A Today Show host was reporting from the scene the day after the shooting. At the time, I remember thinking about the logistics of getting them there on such short notice. The shooting was the lead story for days, if not weeks, on The Today Show and consumed the prominent first half hour of the show. Interviews with students, administrators, law enforcement, first responders, parents and many others provided a human element that helped add a personal dimension to the coverage of the tragedy as well as gave a voice to the grieving community.
Why did the Northern Illinois University shooting not get the same level of media attention as Virginia Tech? Was it because only six people were killed as opposed to 32? I certainly hope not. After thinking about it for a few moments I attributed it to the “Boiled Frog” theory. What? Well, if you want to boil a frog – don’t ask why, just humor me for a second – and you drop it into a pot of boiling water, the frog will jump out. The change is too much, too fast. However, if you put the frog in a cold pot of water and slowly turn the heat up over a longer period of time, the frog will not notice the change and you will be able to boil it. I think viewers and the media alike have become boiled frogs. When we turn on the evening news, we see stories about wars, decapitations, gang rapes, molestations, suicides, kidnappings, armed robberies and a whole host of other unimaginable crimes. However, with rare exception do we stop in our tracks, mouths agape, unable to move because we are frozen by the horror of it all. Instead, we cook dinner, answer the phone, feed the dogs, type emails, and go about our daily routine in spite of these violent stories being reported right before our eyes. How can that be? It’s because the news stories have become progressively worse over a very long period of time and like the frog, the change was so incrementally small and slow over a long period of time that we just adjusted to the news without even noticing.
I always say that if you woke my grandfather up from the dead and put him in front of the news today he would be completely paralyzed by the stories. He died in the seventies and although the world wasn’t a perfect place at that time, the frequency and degree of violent crimes were few and far between compared to today. Taking him from the news he was used to in the seventies to today’s news stories would be too much too quickly and he would not be able to handle it all.
The Virginia Tech massacre ignited shock in us all but to some degree dulled our reaction to similar crimes in the future. Don’t misunderstand my point. I feel tremendous anguish for the people’s who’s lives were affected by the shooting. At the same time, I didn’t have the same level of shock this time as I did when I heard the Virginia Tech story. Unfortunately, ten years from now, these types of school shooting probably won’t even make the national evening news because they will have become more common and less “newsworthy.”
How did the media coverage of the Northern Illinois University shootings make you feel?
February 15th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Remember Columbine? Trench coat mafia. The guy in the mall a few months back. How about the guy in Texas who started all this mayem… in the 60’s who shot up his campus? Marshfield (Mass.) High could have had the same thing happen to them if someone hadn’t alerted authorities. Can’t be video games. They weren’t around in the 60’s. Overbearing parents? Too much Mr. T, not enough Mr. Rogers? Who knows. But the one common denominator in all these shootings is the ready availability of guns. It will happen again and again. Count on it. Maybe we should embrace the opposing view to gun control. Allow concealed weapons for every breathing person. If these kooks even remotely thinks anyone could “make their day” they may think twice.
February 15th, 2008 at 11:25 am
I find this sort of thing fascinating, and I’m instantly teleported back to “Intro to Communications” my freshman year of college in which we tirelessly analyzed the media’s coverage in our quest to become responsible and noble journalists.
I too was struck by how small this story seemed in the way it was reported. But what about the Louisiana Technical College shootings that happened just a week ago February 8th, in which three people were killed. This event was even less of a blip on the media’s radar. IS it the lower death tolls?
What else could be at play? Is it that these two schools have less visibility than Virginia Tech, a well-known university and an athletic powerhouse? I wonder too if the media is responding to critiques that days of coverage gives the shooters’ recognition and the glorified notoriety they are looking for (Seung-Hui Cho, perpetrator of the Virginia Tech shootings, wrote about becoming famous and even sent his own writings to NBC News.)
One optimistic note: Despite the media coverage or lack there of, it does not seem that colleges have numbed to this tragic possibility. Syracuse University, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (two schools I know of personally) have both staged mock events within the past year to train and test emergency response teams.
February 15th, 2008 at 11:48 am
I have to agree with Erin on this one - it is clearly a cry to be infamous. Almost every shooter has made references like “now I will be famous” in their final letters. I’m not sure, however, if avoiding mass coverage of the events would be the anecdote.
What really scares me are the college-level shootings. These kids clearly are stable enough to go through high school, do well enough to be admitted into a college, and then go on to commit these atrocious acts. These aren’t just losers who work in bottom-rung positions (excluding the mall shooter form this past Christmas - he was just fired from McDonald’s). This means they can’t be picked out of a crowd - they aren’t always social misfits. They aren’t the “bad guys” you see in movies.
I think the deluge of coverage for the mall shooting was mainly because it was so different from the usual (it disgusts me to have to use that word) school shootings, but especially because millions of people could relate - going to the mall a lot in December is basically a part of our culture now.
I was surprised at the coverage as well, but I am weirdly happy that they aren’t covering it too much - it gives the shooter less notoriety.
Plus, the cynic in me says that technically, Obama winning over Hillary has a much larger affect on your everyday life - especially if it is somewhat guaranteed that a democrat will take the White House come January.
July 16th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
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