Shedding light on the possible reasons for a dip in such news coverage, a report released Friday found that school shootings were either way down or too depressing for the media to cover. “Really, there are two possibilities here: It could be that there’s been some remarkable progress on getting guns out of the hands of potential school shooters, or it might be that journalists and editors all collectively decided the problem was too painful and intractable and turned away entirely,” read the report, which confirmed that the general sense of there being less live footage of parents weeping in school parking lots recently could certainly be because of a sea change in the rate of such tragedies in America, although it was equally likely that most media outlets had simply ceased paying attention for the benefit of their viewers’ mental health.
“It’s funny, because I can’t think of the last time I heard the words ‘the following footage may be disturbing to some viewers’ uttered on national news, especially above the chyron ‘School Under Lockdown’ or alongside the name of some small town that will never be the same again. Possibly, that means something has changed for the better in this country. Or maybe the problem has gotten so bad that even contemplating it would completely rob viewers of whatever hope they had left. Kind of unclear at this point.” The report went on to speculate on a third possibility: that such stories were still being covered, but that the American populace had gotten so disillusioned at this point that such imagery no longer even registered.
