A consensus has been quietly building among journalists that it is time to stop giving mass killers the unthinking free publicity woven into their motivations for their heinous crimes—and according to the Poynter Institute’s Kelly McBride, it’s beginning to actually take root in media behavior.
At the same time, a Washington Post piece this weekend—an important piece, in fact, exploring the dark world of “incels” and an attempted mass murder in Florida—demonstrated how difficult this will be, and why it will never be practical to make omitting the killer’s name altogether an ironclad rule.
It seems as though March’s horrifying massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, congealed professional journalistic opinion behind Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s firm commitment not to use the name of the killer in public, and her urging that media companies do the same—and, in fact, most large media operations complied. And afterwards, in the aftermath of shootings in Poway, California, and Virginia Beach, Virginia, they have largely continued. As McBride explains, “It’s become clear to researchers that mass shootings bear an element of contagion. Some shooters are trying to set records; they are out for notoriety. Others simply see mass violence as a solution to their problems. Either way, keeping their names out of the headlines may be a key step toward not inspiring others.”
The change, as the piece explains, has been building for some time, and gaining slow consensus among journalists. It’s worth noting that relatively few Americans know or can recall the name of the perpetrator of the Oct. 1, 2017, massacre in Las Vegas—an indicator of this building shift in the professional ethos.
Generally speaking, this change is a very good development, because it will remove an incentive to would-be mass shooters that we know exists—though at the same time, the change is unlikely to do anything concrete to change the dynamic that is creating these killers in the first place.
That, in fact, was the subject of “He Hated Women. Then He Decided to Kill Them,” the Washington Post piece exploring the twisted shooting rampage of a man whose name—Scott Paul Beirele—dominates the story. He’s the “incel”—“involuntary celibate,” a member of the twisted misogynist cult closely related to white nationalism—who walked into a yoga studio in February and killed two women and injured five more.
As we’ve been reporting, Beierle is just one of a growing flood of young white men, “red-pilled” and angry and unhinged, who have been radicalized online and are causing tremendous damage.
When authorities, both in the U.S. and abroad, have talked about online radicalization in the recent past, most of us have tended to think of it in terms of radical Islamists from groups such as the Islamic State, who have been known to leverage the technology to their advantage, particularly social media. A study by terrorism expert J.M. Berger published in 2016 found that white nationalists were far outstripping their Islamist counterparts, however: "On Twitter, ISIS’s preferred social platform, American white nationalist movements have seen their followers grow by more than 600 percent since 2012. Today, they outperform ISIS in nearly every social metric, from follower counts to tweets per day."
“Online radicalization seems to be speeding up, with young men, particularly white men, diving into extremist ideologies quicker and quicker," Berger said, adding that "the result seems to be more violence, as these examples indicate. It is a serious problem and we don’t seem to have any real solutions for it. These cases also show that an era of violence brought on by the internet is indeed upon us, with no end in sight.”
The radicalization process itself often begins with seemingly benign activity, such as spending hours in chat rooms or playing computer games, and these activities provide a kind of cover for the process as it accelerates. This was the subject of the Post article, which laid out the gradual process by which this young man was radicalized. It would not have been possible to explore the details of this process without using his name. It was also an utterly invaluable and perceptive piece of journalism, the kind we actually need more of if we’re going to grapple successfully with this phenomenon.
That’s not to say the piece lacked problems—the largest of which is that it lacked any real reportage on the victims, who they were, and what their stories were. Because eventually, this is a phenomenon that will touch all our lives, if it hasn’t already, and ensuring that the victims don’t become mere anonymous statistics is critical to overcoming the narrative that the mass killers hope to impose on us.
McBride’s article is also unhelpful in its suggestion near the end that perhaps we no longer need this kind of work (“it is no longer easy to believe that any in-depth reporting will explain the motives behind a mass shooting”). In fact, as both the Post piece and a similarly themed New York Times piece about YouTube’s role in this radicalization process made brilliantly clear over the weekend, what we’re seeing right now, in June 2019, is the massification of a relatively new phenomenon, with massive consequences for all of us.
It’s both familiar and entirely new at the same time, and the need to understand it in order to grapple with it is paramount. The need not to glorify these perpetrators should not prevent us from finding ways to short-circuit the cultural and social forces that are creating them—especially when the tide of lethal violence is steadily rising.
Certainly a post hoc action such as refusing to name the perpetrators will do relatively little to actually prevent the creep of white nationalist online radicalization that is the primary fuel for this phenomenon. Stories that explore how the perpetrators got there, and expose the machinations of the movements recruiting these young men into their insane belief systems, will do a lot more for us than any rule governing how or when we name them. It might be best if journalists focused on that.