Ethical Problems of Mass Murder Coverage In The Mass Media

This is a very detailed and informative read concerning mass murders by mass media from 1984-1993.  It's long, so please save it to read when you have time as well as time to absorb all the items in this article.

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[This appeared in the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 9:1 [Winter 1993-94].  It also won First Place, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Ethics Prize, 1993, Undergraduate Division.  (I had to take media ethics class to meet a general education requirement while an undergraduate -- and the prize money paid my tuition that semester!)  I have made a couple of minor arithmetic corrections in Table 1 that do not affect the conclusions of the paper.]

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ABSTRACT: Analyzes news coverage of mass murders in Time and Newsweek for the period 1984-91 for evidence of disproportionate, perhaps politically motivated coverage of certain categories of mass murder. Discusses ethical problems related to news and entertainment attention to mass murder, and suggests methods of enhancing the public's understanding of the nature of murder.[1]

On January 17, 1989, a homosexual prostitute and drug addict with a long history of criminal offenses and mental disturbance, Patrick Purdy, drove up to Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California. He firebombed his car, entered a playground during recess carrying a Chinese-made AKS (a semiautomatic version of the full automatic AK-47), shot to death five children, wounded 29 other children and a teacher, then shot himself in the head with a 9mm handgun.

Initial coverage of Purdy's crime was relatively restrained, and only the essential details were reported. Time gave Purdy only part of a page in the first issue after the crime ("Slaughter in a School Yard", 1989). Newsweek gave a single page to "Death on the Playground," and pointed to four prior attacks on school children, starting with Laurie Dann. Purdy's photograph was included in the Newsweek article. Newsweek's article (Baker, Joseph, and Cerio, 1989) quoted one of the authors of a book on mass murder: "There's a copycat element that cannot be denied."

But a week later, Patrick Purdy's name continued to receive press attention, and consequently his fame increased. The front cover of Time showed an AK-47 and an AR-15 crossed, beneath an outline of the U.S., stylized into a jawless skull, entitled, "Armed America." Inside, George Church's "The Other Arms Race," (1989) which occupied slightly more than 6½ pages, opened with Patrick Purdy's name. Articles referencing Purdy or his crime continued to appear in both Newsweek or Time for many months.

On September 14, 1989, Joseph Wesbecker, a disabled employee of Standard Gravure Co. in Kentucky, entered the printing plant carrying an AKS and a 9mm handgun. How profoundly similar Wesbecker's actions were to Purdy's was shortly detailed by UPI wire service stories, such as William H. Inman's "Wesbecker's rampage is boon to gun dealers" (1989a):

When Joseph Wesbecker, a mental patient, read about the destructive power of Patrick Purdy's weapon in a Stockdale[sic], Calif., schoolyard massacre in January, Wesbecker knew he'd have to have the gun.

So he bought an AK-47, a Chinese-made assault rifle firing 7.62mm rounds capable of blowing holes in concrete walls. He used a picture to describe the gun to a local dealer, who ordered it through the mail.

Wesbecker, police say, was already planned a massacre of his own -- one which killed eight Thursday and wounded 13. He used an AK-47 on all victims but himself. He committed suicide with a pistol.

In the same way Wesbecker's interest was peaked[sic] -- he had clipped out a February Time magazine article on some of Purdy's exploits -- gun dealers expect a renewed blaze of interest in the big gun.

"With all the media attention since then," said Ray Yeager, owner of Ray's Gun Shop in Louisville, "and all the anti-gunners's attempts to ban (assault rifles), the result has been massive sales." [2]

How important was the news coverage of Purdy's crime in influencing Wesbecker's actions, above and beyond identifying the weapon of choice for such an act of savagery? Police now believe Wesbecker had begun plotting the suicide rampage for at least seven months. Searching Wesbecker's house, police found a copy of a Feb. 6 Time magazine detailing mass murders in California, Oklahoma, Texas and elsewhere. A headline underlined by Wesbecker read

"Calendar of Senseless Shootings."

The major gun purchases were made between February and May.

Initially police thought Wesbecker was an ardent gun handler or paramilitary buff, but evidence indicates his interest in guns was relatively young.

"We have no information indicating he had a collection of guns, or was even interested in them before last year," said Lt. Jeff Moody, homicide investigator. "As far as we know he had no formal training in weapon use." (Inman, 1989b)

This disturbing information about the connection between the Time article and Wesbecker's actions didn't make it into Time, Newsweek, or many newspapers' coverage of this tragedy. The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Santa Rosa (Cal.) Press-Democrat, all left this embarrassing detail � at least embarrassing to Time � out of their coverage. It wasn't a lack of space that was responsible for this omission, for this was a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times and the Press-Democrat.

Nor was it that no one in the media saw a connection between Wesbecker's reading material and the crime. The Los Angeles Times, the Press-Democrat, and the New York Times all suggested a connection between Wesbecker's actions and Soldier of Fortune magazine. Wesbecker had taken to readingSoldier of Fortune, but none of the articles indicate that Soldier of Fortune had been found in such an incriminating position as the Time article (Harrison, 1989). Apparently, Soldier of Fortune's mere presence in Wesbecker's home was an important piece of news, while the marked-up copy of Time, left open, wasn't important enough to merit coverage. Of the four newspapers examined for coverage, only the San Francisco Chronicle included the disturbing connection between Time's coverage and the crime:

At Wesbecker's home, police found manuals on weapons and a February 6 issue of Time magazine devoted to mass killers, including Robert Sherrill, who slaughtered 14 people in an Oklahoma post office three years ago, and Patrick Purdy, who killed five children with an AK-47 assault rifle in Stockton, Calif., in January. An AK-47 was the main weapon used by Wesbecker. ("Kentucky Killer's Weird Collection", 1989) Clearly, Joseph Wesbecker was not a healthy, well-adjusted person driven to commit his crime simply because of the sensational news coverage. To argue this would take away Joseph Wesbecker's personal responsibility for his actions. As tempting as it might be to hold Time responsible for having indirectly caused this horrible crime, this temptation must be resisted. The editors of Time might have forseen the possibility of their coverage promoting "copycat" crimes, but to use this as a principle of law would make it impossible to ever write a factual account of a serious crime, without fear of being hauled into a court to answer for the actions of a deranged reader. Indeed, even this discussion of the ethical problems could be considered inflammatory, by such a standard.

But even absent a notion of legal responsibility, there should be a notion of moral responsibility, and awareness of a causal relationship should provoke concern among journalists. Joseph Wesbecker, without question, was headed towards some sort of unpleasant ending to his life. But in the absence of the February 6th coverage by Time, would he have chosen this particular method of getting attention? Wesbecker was under psychiatric care at the time, and had already made three suicide attempts (Inman, 1989b). Did Time's sensational coverage, transforming the short unhappy life of Patrick Purdy from obscurity to permanent notoriety, encourage Wesbecker to transform the end of his life from, at most, a local news story of a suicide, into a story that was carried from coast to coast?

Newsweek and especially Time, perhaps for reasons of circulation, perhaps for political reasons, have engaged in ethically questionable practices in recent years in their coverage of mass murder in the United States. These practices were unquestionably a major cause of the murder of seven people in 1989, and may have played a role in the murders of others in recent years. The actions they took provide a concrete example of a problem in media ethics that is at least two centuries old: how much coverage should the press give to violent crime?

There are three related ethical problems that will be addressed in this paper:

1. The level of coverage given by Time and Newsweek (and perhaps, by the other news media) to certain great crimes appears to encourage unbalanced people, seeking a lasting fame, to copy these crimes � as we will see indisputably happened in Joseph Wesbecker's 1989 homicidal rampage.

2. Analysis of the quantity of press coverage given to mass murder suggests that political motivations may have caused Newsweek and especially Time to give undue attention to a particular type of mass murder, ultimately to the detriment of public safety.

3. The coverage given to murder by Newsweek and Time gives the electorate a very distorted notion of the nature of murder in the United States, almost certainly in the interests of promoting a particular political agenda.

Fame and infamy are in an ethical sense, opposites. Functionally, they are nearly identical. Imagine an alien civilization that does not share our notions of good and evil, studying the expanding shell of television signals emanating from our planet. To such extraterrestials, Winston Churchill and Adolph Hitler are both "famous"; without an ability to appreciate the vituperation our civilization uses to describe Hitler, they might conclude that both were "great men." Indeed, they might assume that Hitler was the "greater" of the two, because there has certainly been more broadcast about Hitler than about Churchill. The human need to celebrate human nobility, and to denounce human depravity, has caused us to devote tremendous attention, both scholarly and popular, to portraying the polar opposites of good and evil.

The pursuit of fame can lead people to acts of great courage and nobility. It can also lead to acts of great savagery. The Italian immigrant Simon Rodia, builder of Los Angeles' Watts Towers, once explained that his artistic effort was the result of an ordinary person's desire for fame, because, "A man has to be good-good or bad-bad to be remembered." ("Simon Rodia, 90, Tower Builder", 1965) But for most people, fame isn't as easy as building towers of steel, concrete, and pottery. Unfortunately, being "bad-bad" is easier than being "good-good" � as history amply demonstrates.

In 356 BC, an otherwise unremarkable Greek named Herostratus burned the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in an effort to immortalize his name. That we remember the name of this arsonist, the destroyer of one of the Seven Wonders of the World, shows that great crimes can achieve lasting fame (Bengston, 1968, p. 305; De Camp, 1963, p. 91; Coleman-North, 1963, 10:414). [3] Fisher Ames, a Massachusetts Federalist who sat in the House of Representatives from 1789 to 1800, expressed his concerns about this very subject in the October, 1801 issue of the Palladium:

Some of the shocking articles in the papers raise simple, and very simple, wonder; some terror; and some horror and disgust. Now what instruction is there in these endless wonders? Who is the wiser or happier for reading the accounts of them? On the contrary, do they not shock tender minds, and addle shallow brains? They make a thousand old maids, and eight or ten thousand booby boys, afraid to go to bed alone. Worse than this happens; for some eccentric minds are turned to mischief by such accounts as they receive of troops of incendiaries burning our cities; the spirit of imitation is contagious; and boys are found unaccountably bent to do as men do...

Every horrid story in a newspaper produces a shock; but, after some time, this shock lessens. At length, such stories are so far from giving pain, that they rather raise curiosity, and we desire nothing so much as the particulars of terrible tragedies (Allen, 1983, pp. 14-15).

The problem that concerned Rep. Ames remains with us today � as the two 1989 mass murders discussed above, linked by this "spirit of imitation," demonstrate.

Mass murder isn't new to America (or anywhere else) ¾ nor is the popular horror and interest in such crimes. Consider the following children's doggerel about the 1892 murders in Fall River, Massachusetts ("Borden, Lizzie Andrew", 1963, 4:266):

Lizzie Borden took an ax 
and gave her mother forty whacks. 
When she saw what she had done, 
she gave her father forty-one.As a child growing up in the 1960s, I remember vividly the horror at, but also widespread coverage of, the crimes of Richard Speck, Charles Manson & friends, and the Zodiac killer. In the mid-1960s, when I must have been old enough to have seen newspaper coverage of it (though it made no conscious impression on me), Charles Whitman engaged in a murderous rampage from a university tower in Texas, killing 16 people with a rifle.

In the 1980s, there were a number of mass murders in the United States, and yet the quantity of press coverage for these crimes varied widely. All other things being equal, when mass murder is committed in this country, we should expect the coverage to be generally proportionate to the number of victims. How do we measure the quantity of press coverage for a major crime? The more remote a newspaper is from a crime, the less extensive the coverage we should expect. As a result, it would not be a meaningful measure of the quantity of press coverage to examine any sort of local or even regional newspaper coverage; the coverage of a West Coast crime in California newspapers will doubtless be far greater than coverage of a similar crime that took place on the East Coast. A more meaningful measurement is the press coverage given by the national news magazines, such as Time andNewsweek.

An analysis of articles in Time and Newsweek, America's mass circulation news magazines, shows some interesting characteristics of how mass murder in America is covered. For the purposes of this paper, any article which mentioned a mass murderer, even by referring to his specific criminal act, was considered to be "fame" in the sense we defined earlier in this paper. Even if the article was primarily about some related subject, if the mass murderer was mentioned, the entire article was considered as adding to that killer's fame.

Why the entire article? Because a potential mass murderer will consider any future article that mentions him to be "publicity." Wesbecker demonstrated this by leaving open in his room the February 6th Time article. Although the article was primarily about gun control and mass murder, it included Purdy's name and crime as part of the introduction.

Attempting to locate articles that refer to these mass murderers is difficult, because many of these articles are not locatable by keyword search. In the case of mass murderers who used guns, I looked through all the articles during the period 1984-1991 that were about gun control or mass murder, and I included only those that referenced the murderers or their crimes. For arson murders, I looked up articles about arson and fire hazards. Articles purely about gun control or fire hazards that failed to mention these mass murderers by name or action, were not included in the analysis. For mass murders committed with other weapons, I looked up appropriate articles about the weapon used, as well as articles about mass murder.

The criticism could be made that even a brief mention of a mass murderer's actions in a larger article will tend to exaggerate the level of coverage given to that crime. This is a valid concern, but as long as all categories of mass murder receive identical treatment, the results should be roughly equivalent. Where an article contained no mention of the mass murderer or his actions, and a sidebar article did, only the sidebar article was included in the computation of the space given.

What constitutes mass murder? This is important, because by manipulative definition of "mass murder," one can prove nearly anything about the news coverage. Clearly, there is a difference between serial murderers, and mass murderers, and a difference that makes them non-comparable from the standpoint of analyzing the news coverage. The difference is that serial murderers commit their crimes over a very long period of time, and so each murder is, by itself, a minor story. Also, because serial murderers sometimes are successful in making the remains of the victim disappear, the only news story is when that serial murderer's actions are finally noticed.

For these reasons, and for the purposes of this paper, a mass murder has two distinguishing characteristics:

1. Actions intentionally taken, with the expectation that great loss of life will result, or where any reasonable person would recognize that great loss of life will result. The component of expecting loss of life, of course, is a fundamental part of the question of whether publicity plays a role in promoting such crimes.

For this reason, I have excluded such tragedies as Larry Mahoney's drunken driving motor vehicle wreck that caused 27 deaths in May of 1988. Mahoney was convicted of manslaughter, so the essential element of premeditation was lacking, except in the sense that getting drunk and operating a motor vehicle is potentially quite dangerous ("Convicted. Larry Mahoney", 1990). However, including crimes like Mahoney's in this study would tend to strengthen my argument that Time and Newsweek give special treatment to firearms mass murderers, since Mahoney received no press in Newsweek, and only 0.15 square inches per victim in Time.

2. The actions causing the loss of life all take place within 24 hours, or the deaths are all discovered within 24 hours. This is an arbitrary period of time, of course. It could have been extended to 48 hours, or 72 hours, however, without significantly widening the bloody pool of crimes whose coverage we will study.

Most people I talk to are quite surprised to find out that there are mass murderers who kill with weapons other than guns. They are even more surprised when they find out that arson mass murder victims in the last few years have outnumbered gun mass murders. Why is this a surprise? The reason is that press coverage of non-firearms mass murders is almost non-existent. As Table 1 shows, arson mass murderers and knife mass murderers receive relatively little attention from Time and Newsweek. As should be obvious, there is a very large discrepancy between the amount of coverage given to arson mass murders, and mass murderers involving guns exclusively. [4] Almost nine times as much coverage were given to exclusive firearms mass murderers, as to arson mass murderers. 
 

Murderer	Month/Year	Dead	Time sq. in.	Time Sq. Inches/Dead	Newsweek sq. in.	Newsweek Sq. Inches/Dead	Total Sq. Inches/Dead
James Huberty	Jul-84	22	109.63	4.98	157.50	7.16	12.14
Sylvia Seegrist	Nov-85	2	20.75	10.38	0.00	0.00	10.38
William Bryan Cruse	Apr-87	6	33.06	5.51	0.00	0.00	5.51
David Burke	Dec-87	43	52.50	1.22	57.75	1.34	2.56
Robert Dreesman	Dec-87	7	105.00	15.00	0.00	0.00	15.00
Ronald Gene Simmons	Dec-87	16	15.94	1.00	78.75	4.92	5.92
Richard Wade Farley	Feb-88	7	11.25	1.61	0.00	0.00	1.61
Laurie Wasserman Dann	May-88	2	107.63	53.81	54.00	27.00	80.81
Patrick Purdy	Jan-89	6	720.00	120.00	370.34	61.72	181.72
Joseph T. Wesbecker	Sep-89	8	19.69	2.46	52.50	6.56	9.02
James E. Pough	Jun-90	9	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
George Hennard	Oct-91	24	225.00	9.38	78.75	3.28	12.66
Firearms Murders		152	1420.44	9.34	849.59	5.59	14.93
Firearms Murders excl. Patrick Purdy		146	700.44	4.80	479.25	3.28

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