Was There Too Much Media Coverage Of The Littleton, Co Murders?

Two young men wearing long black trench coats (later identified as members of the "trench coat mafia") enter a Colorado suburban high school. It was their high school, filled with their classmates and teachers. Two excruciating hours later thirty-one people were wounded and fifteen people were dead including the gunmen who chose to end their killing spree by turning the guns on themselves. The media coverage of this horrifying incident was astronomical - and the source of much criticism in the aftermath.

The public's immediate response to the April 1999 shootings at the Columbine High School was to find someone and/or something to blame. The fact that the Columbine killers were white, affluent, and popular; not at all fitting your "typical" profile of a murderer, likely was for some the most distressing fact of all. Psychologists, sociologists, politicians and average citizens alike were quick to point the finger indiscriminately at any number of potential causes; including the school teachers, the parents, video games, TV violence, heavy metal music (specifically Marilyn Manson), "Goth" culture, assault weapons, web sites, teenage depression, prejudice, and peer-group bullying. Nothing and no one was sacred; everyone and everything was attacked and subjected to intense public scrutiny. While many seem to ascribe to the school of thought that this was a social problem with a single cause or answer, I feel that it was a combination of many diverse factors that contributed to the highly complicated nature of this conflict.

That being said, in particular I believe that the various attacks on the quality and quantity of the media depictions of the Columbine murders are unduly harsh and unjustified. In the wake of a shockingly diabolical event, these journalists attempted to report an accurate accounting of an incident that was quickly turning into a national sensation. As they attempted to answer the question foremost on everyone's mind - what happened? - they spent the majority of the scrambling to get the facts. Often eye witnesses are asked to comment and bystanders will volunteer to talk about what happened. On occasion this will lead incomplete and/or conflicting stories, but such misinformation is corrected as soon as possible.

Critics like Paul Klite, founder of Rocky Mountain Media Watch, a Denver-based group that monitors newscasts throughout the nation, raised the issue of live coverage, saying "I'm distressed by this pattern of wall-to-wall coverage of violent events to the exclusion of any other news and by the need to do it live, ... [w]hat you get now... is a lot of speculation and a lot of incomplete information and repetition. It may be dramatic and sensational but it's not very substantive." What Klite is failing to take into account are the many benefits of live coverage; for many parents it was the only source of information they had access to where they could hope to receive word on the welfare of their children inside.

The following four facts, compiled by the National Center for Children Exposed to Violence (NCCEV), give statistics on the prevalence of television and the media in the lives of American youth:

1) In 1950, only 10% of American

...