Caffeinated Politics

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the dastardly crimes being committed through orders from President Putin’s generals, along with the mass deaths needlessly perpetrated by the violence committed by Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza, make for graphic and painful images on news programming 24/7.  But when it comes to the carnage in our own nation from gun violence, news editors trim the tape and sanitize the coverage.

News coverage of gun violence should not be stripped of its visceral reality. There must be an awareness in newsrooms of being franker about what is actually occurring many times each day when guns are fired at other people in this nation. There is no purpose in airing only sterile statistics, distant headlines, and sanitized videos or soundbites. This detachment breeds complacency among the citizenry. The media shielded the public from the graphic truth of what a bullet did to Kirk, as blood pumped out of a gaping neck wound. When our news media limit the scope of what happens by not airing graphic video, it only aids in normalizing the violence from guns, making it abstract and easier to ignore as it becomes just another daily event.

I contend that journalists have a professional responsibility not just to inform, but to confront. (In a far different time and in a different context, when working at WDOR radio, I did a week-long series that ran on most of the daily newscasts dealing with HIV and pressing how it was not a gay disease. It was a factual 3-minute report each day, but some listeners found it highly controversial. The station owner, a man then in his late 70s, took my side as it was news reporting the way it should be undertaken.) When it comes to showing the raw, unfiltered consequences of gun violence, it can better inform and jolt viewers out of numbness and into awareness. That, too, is a role for news reporters to work at in their profession.

When journalists do their jobs fully and news editors and publishers allow it, there can be positive outcomes. It then forces a reckoning among the readers, listeners, and viewers of the news. It humanizes victims, exposes brutality, and underscores the urgency of, in this case, gun control laws and reforms that are needed. Sanitized coverage may protect the sensibilities of those who are too fragile to live in the world created by the NRA, but it also protects the status quo. If we want change, we must first see the cost.