David Hogg was a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. He has ridden to notoriety on that affiliation.. and on Michael Bloomberg’s money. Recently, Hogg condemned USA Today for turning the Parkland murderer into a celebrity. Hogg is wrong about gun control, but he is right about the news media. I’d say that Hogg didn’t go far enough in condemning the media’s role in getting our kids killed. Let’s take a step back and walk the stepping stones of celebrity violence.
Since its inception in 1980, CNN was one of the first 27-7 cable news outlets. Fox News came years later in 1996. Both networks had to fill the airwaves with compelling programming. That news environment was a sharp contrast from the measured comments of the Walter Cronkite era. Today, the news can tell us the truth or it can lie to us, but we’ll turn them off if they bore us for a second.
Enter the mass murder in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996. This was a perfect story for the news media. The story had a bad guy and lots of innocent victims. The media could speculate for hours as to why the murderer killed school children.. and they did exactly that. They showed the murderer’s face and said his name for days on end. The media turned the dead murderer into an overnight world-wide celebrity.
A month later we saw the next mass murder in Port Arthur, Australia where a man again murdered innocent victims. This murder, however, was different. The murderer had seen the publicity given to the Dunblane murderer. The murderer at Port Arthur wanted that celebrity for himself.