Was there ever a news event in our lifetimes that the media fumbled more aggressively than Columbine. They genuinely got every single detail wrong
From reporting that they killed someone for saying she believed in God (they spared a different girl who said she did) to not reporting that they sought out students of color while yelling racial slurs - on Hitler’s birthday & a day after the anniversary of OKC and Waco - while promoting the idea that you have to watch out for loner bullied nerds. Even though later research shows that the shooters were, in fact, bullies themselves, who had a wide social circle, and they were, you know, Nazis motivated by racism and not the video game Doom (1993).
It’s a generational fuck-up, the GOAT of bad reporting bc it’s still with us. The narrative of persecution after “she said yes” is a huge reason the evangelical right is like how it is today (they made a biopic that uncritically repeated it just a couple years ago!) & they still push the idea that it’s primarily victims who do that sort of thing and not aggressors & people still shared that stupid video of Marilyn Manson saying he’d “listen” until a couple years ago (though the shooters being abusive Nazi creeps would uh, not diminish Marilyn Manson’s desire to befriend them, I feel)
I think often of how much quiet work I had to do after to protect my sweet gentle goth students from other teachers and admin after because of the disinformation.
There was this thread (part two) at the time full of stories of schools targeting anything associated with nerds, outcasts, or loners, based on this narrative. The way the media accursed the persecuted and vulnerable as potential killers, and fed into the persecution narrative of the ones who persecuted them with the false “she said yes” story, after the event is just abhorrent to look back on
Roger Ebert once told a story about how he was interviewed for the nightly news at the time. They asked him if he thought violent movies were responsible; he said no. What about The Basketball Diaries? No, that was a flop & it’s unlikely they ever saw it. He said: “Events like this, if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me.” They never used the interview, and just aired a bunch of people willing to say “YES, it is Doom and horror movies!” instead. Which is just. So depressing, about what it implies about the media coverage and how devoted they were to their narrative