The guidelines recommend that media outlets avoid repetitive, glamorizing, or sensational coverage, and should not offer simplistic explanations for suicide. Methods should not be graphically discussed. Final notes should not be reprinted. Photographs of the location of the death, of memorial sites, and of grieving family members may be inflammatory, and should be avoided.
By agreeing to report on suicides not as if they were high-profile crimes, but as part of a massive public health problem, members of major media outlets have saved lives. The two areas of exception are death by suicide of a high-profile celebrity, and murder-suicide. Now, I’m not naive enough to believe I will ever see a world where there is no coverage surrounding the death of a well-known figure like Robin Williams, or of an event like the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. As tragic as these events may be, they are also news stories. But there are many ways even these events can be covered more responsibly, and there is a strong argument for doing so. I believe, in particular, there is a compelling argument for changing the way we cover murder-suicide.
A growing body of research suggests that the rising number of mass shootings in the United States is inextricably linked—along with the easy availability of high-capacity guns, and a lack of knowledge about and support for brain health issues—to the way the media cover these events. And if such media coverage can either contain or instigate contagion, then I agree with media experts like Drs. Frank Ochberg and Zeynep Tufekci that it is imperative to institute a new set of guidelines for reporting on murder-suicide.
There is, of course, already a material difference between the way these events are covered by legitimate mainstream news organizations and what happens in the deepest, darkest corners of the Internet—or even on cable news, with twenty-four hours of programming to fill. Meg Moritz, a journalist and professor who has looked closely at the media coverage of Columbine, reminded me that the journalists in question are often making split-second decisions under less-than-optimal circumstances. Even so, it’s not unreasonable to expect legitimate news organizations to follow best-practice guidelines.
Many of these guidelines are “don’ts.” Don’t show images of the shooter, particularly ones of him with weapons, or in the outfit he chose to carry out the massacre. Don’t show the weapons used, or other evidence. Don’t endlessly repeat the name of the shooter; instead, refer to “the killer” or “the perpetrator.” Don’t give airtime or publish the videos they make (like the Basement Tapes) or manifestos posted to their social media accounts. Don’t compare the killer to other killers, particularly by putting emphasis on how many people they have killed. Tufekci believes that numbers—how many dead and injured, the number of bullets fired—and photographs are particularly inflammatory, as they provide a benchmark for competition. Don’t sensationalize the violence or the body count—“the most people killed and injured in the country’s history!” Don’t oversimplify the motivations behind the act.
Most important, don’t inadvertently make heroes out of the killers. It seems obvious, and yet when an event like this happens, you can’t avoid detailed (and, I would argue, fetishistic) descriptions of the weapons used, how the killers hid their arsenals, what they did and ate on the fateful day, exactly what they wore. Their names become household names. We know their favorite foods, video games, movies, and bands. These details may eventually emerge, of course; leaks happen, and the Internet is the Internet. But if these images and details accelerate and inspire violence, then they should not be endlessly repeated on CNN.
Dr. Frank Ochberg is a psychiatrist, a pioneer in trauma science, and the chairman emeritus of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University. When he educates journalists about trauma, he advises them to broaden the discussion around traumatic events instead of sensationalizing them. Which details will genuinely help us to unravel the events that have taken place? What resources can we point people to? How can we set this tragedy in a larger context of mental health?
One of the biggest improvements would simply be to refrain from jumping to conclusions, especially by oversimplifying root causes. School shooters don’t kill people “because” of violent video games or techno music, and people don’t die by suicide because they’ve lost a job or been dumped by a girlfriend. Many articles I read in the wake of Robin Williams’s death expressed shock that a man so wealthy and beloved could feel he had nothing to live for. Of course, money and popularity don’t protect people from brain illness any more than they cause it.
When we oversimplify the cause of a suicide, we create risk by suggesting that a romantic rejection or a setback at work is a reason to consider death. A firing or a breakup might contribute to someone’s despondency, but people get dumped and fired all the time; these events by themselves cannot explain why someone dies by suicide. Similarly, violent video games have been shown to desensitize kids to the reality of violence, and they are likely particularly dangerous for vulnerable kids who are struggling with brain illness or other cofactors. But school shooters don’t go on rampages because they played Grand Theft Auto or Doom.
It’s my hope the recommendations I have made here won’t be seen as pro-censorship or a threat to free speech, but as a call for ethical reporting. (In an act I respect greatly, the novelist Stephen King asked his publisher to withdraw his novel Rage after a number of school shooters quoted from it.) The iconic Columbine photograph is a still from the surveillance tape showing Dylan and Eric in full paramilitary garb, brandishing their weapons in the school cafeteria. Whenever I see it—especially when it accompanies an article that purports to be taking a more constructive approach—I have to stop myself from throwing the magazine across the room.
Certainly there is precedent for changing the way the media report events with an eye to the greater good. A good reporter would never dream of publishing a sexual assault victim’s name, or specific troop movements. Perhaps it will soon become similarly unthinkable to publish a killer’s mug shot over the number of people he killed and injured in bright, blood red.
Some news organizations have begun to listen. In 2014, a conservative Canadian network made the decision not to name or show a photograph of the perpetrator who shot five police officers, two fatally. The editorial they ran explained the decision: “It’s easy to report on the life of the killer, to scour his deranged Facebook page, to speculate about motive, but doing so could actually encourage the perception that his heinous acts are somehow justified.” I don’t feel as strongly about hiding the names of the killers as many media analysts do; I’m happy to leave that recommendation to someone better qualified. However, it’s notable that the station’s in-depth coverage of the event was in no way compromised because they did not report those details.
In many countries in Europe, national news councils monitor coverage and penalize infractions. This is probably impossible in the United States, and may not be desirable (although I wish there had been an avenue to discipline the National Enquirer, which published leaked crime-scene photographs from Columbine, including a photograph of Dylan and Eric dead in the library). There are conversations happening in the best newsrooms every day about sensitivity and contagion and trauma. I believe that, in time and with education, news agencies will adopt these guidelines voluntarily, for the simple reason that it is the right thing to do. In the meantime, when you see coverage you feel is irresponsible, you can (as I do) write an e-mail to the news organization, or make your objections heard on social media.
The fear of contagion was the main reason Tom and I fought so hard to keep the Basement Tapes sealed, but it was not the only one. Aside from whatever destructive behaviors another alienated kid might learn, I was horrified to think the friends and families of people who had suffered losses might be re-traumatized unwittingly, simply because they happened to be flipping through a magazine in a grocery store line, or sitting underneath a television at a sports bar.
I was also concerned that releasing the tapes would continue to feed
the comforting fantasy that evil will present itself in a way only a fool could fail to recognize. For me, the tragedy at Columbine was proof of how dangerous this fantasy can be. When you watch Dylan on the videos, you think: That kid is insane, practically boiling over with rage. He is planning to commit real violence, and to die by suicide. Those parents must have been complete idiots. There’s no way they could live in the same house with that person and not know he was dangerous.
All I can say is it’s what I would have thought, too.
There was no way to release the tapes responsibly. Nor was there a convincing reason to do so. An army of professional investigators and psychologists had studied the tapes, and they had been unable to reach agreement regarding why Dylan and Eric had committed this atrocity. What on earth was the general population going to learn?
I often think it would be far more instructive—and frightening—to show the video we took of Dylan on the afternoon of his prom, three days before the massacre, smiling and playfully tossing tiny snowballs at his dad behind the camera. To my mind, the expertise with which desperate people can mask their true feelings and intentions is the far more important message.
The tapes stayed private. Conspiracy theorists raged, but there was no cover-up. There just wasn’t anything worth seeing.
• • •
My relationship with Dylan in my head and heart has changed. I’m so angry with him right now. I wonder what I did as a Mom to make him feel so hurt, so angry, so disconnected.
—Journal entry, October 1999
Leaving the sheriff’s office after seeing the Basement Tapes, I was in a whole-body state of shock. In the parking lot I staggered toward the car, slurring my words like a drunk. The horror of what we had just heard—not to mention that the tragedy could have been so much more severe, and the violence perpetrated so substantially worse—practically brought me to my knees.
In the days and months after that meeting, my entire world broke open all over again. Viewing the Basement Tapes finally forced me to see my son the way the rest of the world saw him. No wonder they thought he was a monster.
There’s a miniature gyroscope in each one of us, searching for equilibrium and maintaining our orientation. For months after seeing the Basement Tapes, no modulation was possible. I could barely tell which way was up.
Once I emerged from a state of shock and started to feel something again, I was consumed with fury. I was reeling from what Dylan had done to so many innocent people, and what he might have done to so many more. I had kept his loving memory alive in my heart all those months, but he had destroyed that memory, and everything else. At Thanksgiving, the only thing I could think of to be thankful for was that the bombs hadn’t gone off. Dylan’s empty chair was a reminder of the other families, mere miles away, with empty chairs of their own. I held Byron’s hand while he graciously gave his thanks for the food and for us, but there was no possibility of further conversation, or of eating more than a perfunctory bite. When Byron excused himself from the table after a miserable fifteen minutes and stood up to carry his dishes into the kitchen, Tom and I both started crying.
My digestive issues worsened that fall. When my annual gynecological checkup rolled around, my doctor was genuinely freaked out by the way I looked and sounded. I’d known him for years; he’d delivered Dylan, in fact, and I’d been pregnant at the same time as his wife, so we’d been in the same new baby care class. As a medical professional and as a friend, he was adamant: I needed to find a therapist.
It was truer than he knew. Because of the legal restrictions, I’d never joined a support group. And while my friends and colleagues had been wonderful in allowing me to share my memories of Dylan and my grief and my questions, how on earth could I talk about what I’d seen on those tapes? The lawsuits made it impossible, first of all. And now that some of my questions had been answered, my shame and anger eclipsed everything else.
Desperate, I made an appointment with the therapist I’d seen in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. I’d always suspected he didn’t have the right training to handle the complications of my situation, and that appointment was the final straw. After I’d told him what we’d seen and heard on the tapes, he could only sit in stunned silence. Finally, he confessed he was in over his head, and didn’t know how to help. He asked if I would be willing to allow him to consult with another counselor. Though I was grateful to him for his honesty and his help, we agreed to part ways.
I asked for recommendations from my doctor, from friends, and from a pastor and a rabbi. Gary Lozow helped me to vet the candidates. It was a dispiriting process. One therapist couldn’t wait to get off the phone when she heard who I was. She didn’t want to become entangled in the many lawsuits swirling around our family. Some displayed a prurient interest in the details of the case, while others confessed they simply weren’t up to the task. We kept at the search, and I found someone who had also lost a child, which made a world of difference. When I looked into her eyes, I felt I’d come home.
In truth, I was only blindingly angry with Dylan for a few days after seeing the tapes. I had to let it go. Anger blocks the feeling of love, and the love kept winning.
• • •
It was my new therapist who helped me to see why that day at the sheriff’s office had devastated me so entirely. I’d had to start the grieving process all over again. The Dylan I had already mourned was gone, replaced by someone I didn’t even recognize.
Like Dorian Gray’s portrait, the picture I had of Dylan in my mind grew uglier every time I looked at it. The buffer I’d clung to all those months—believing he’d been an unwitting or coerced participant, or acting in a moment of madness—was gone. The evil face I’d seen on the tapes was a side of him I did not recognize, a side I’d never seen during his life. After seeing the tapes, it was really hard not to say, That devil—that is who he was.
With my therapist’s help, I would find there was no lasting comfort in casting Dylan as a monster. Deep down, I couldn’t reconcile that characterization with the Dylan I had known. The rest of the world could explain away what he had done: either he was born evil—a bad seed—or he’d been raised without moral guidance. I knew it wasn’t nearly so simple.
After we saw the Basement Tapes, I opened a small box in my desk drawer where I keep a few treasured keepsakes. Among them was a tiny origami horse. I checked and rechecked the box for the little horse, periodically taking it out to examine it as if its folds held the answer to the questions I was asking.
When Dylan was about nine years old, I contracted a nasty eye infection that persisted despite several trips to the doctor. Dylan had been concerned, checking my eyes often to see if they had improved. He was always a physically affectionate child, and I can still summon the sense memory of his hand on my shoulder as he peered anxiously into my eyes. While I was still healing, I discovered a tiny winged horse made of folded paper carefully placed on my desk, along with a note in his childish handwriting. The note said, “I hope my get well Pegasus makes you well. I made him espessially for you. Love, Dylan.”
How could I reconcile the cherub with the halo of golden hair who used to giggle while smashing kisses into my face, and the man—that killer—on screen? How could the person who had made me this get-well Pegasus possibly be the same person I’d seen on that tape? I needed to synthesize my own experience of mothering that boy while acknowledging the person he’d become at the end of his life.
There was no longer any way to avoid the horrific fact that my son had planned and committed nightmarish acts of cruelty. But the gentle-hearted kid who’d made me that Pegasus; the lovely, shy boy who couldn’t resist helping with a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle; the young man whose characteristic bark of a laugh punctuated the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes we watched together—he had been real, too. Who was it I had loved, and why had I loved him?
A friend once e-mailed me the following quotation, and it struck me as so apt that I dug up the book to read
more: “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart,” Rainer Maria Rilke writes in his fourth letter to a young poet. “Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
A time would come when my heart would fully open once again to my son—when I could weep not only for his victims, but also for him. I would learn of the deep suffering Dylan experienced, perhaps for years, of which I had been totally unaware. The anxiety disorder and PTSD I would experience myself after Columbine would provide me with firsthand experience in the ways that a crisis in brain health can distort a person’s reasoning. None of this would excuse or lessen what Dylan did. Yet my greater understanding of the brain illness I now believe gripped him enabled me to grieve for him again.
That process would take years. First I had to live the question, and everything unsolved in my heart. Seeing those tapes was the first step. As terrible as the experience was, I had to accept that Dylan had been an active and willing participant in the massacre. Going forward, I would need to piece together the contradictory fragments I had collected in order to understand how Dylan could have hidden a side of himself so entirely from Tom and me, as well as from his teachers, his closest friends, and their parents.
And I was determined to do so, not simply so I could have a context for my own grief and horror, but to understand what I could have done differently.
Mother's Reckoning : Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (9781101902769) Page 17
