What we learned from analyzing thousands of stories on the Christchurch shooting

On March 15, 2019, a gunman opened fire on worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 50 and wounding dozens of others. In the wake of the worst terrorist attack in the country’s modern history, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared of the shooter, “He is a terrorist; he is a criminal; he is an extremist. But he will, when I speak, be nameless.” Explaining her decision not to name the shooter, Ardern said, “He sought many things from his act of terror, but one was notoriety. And that is why you will never hear me mention his name.”

What we learned from analyzing thousands of stories on the Christchurch shooting AdobeStock_67629490-1-1300x500

What we learned from analyzing thousands of stories on the Christchurch shooting AdobeStock_67629490-1-1300x500

Prime Minister Ardern’s position is consistent with the advice of No Notoriety, a media advocacy organization founded by Tom and Caren Teves, whose 24-year-old son, Alex, was killed during a mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado. Their campaign urges the media to report on mass shootings without amplifying the ideology of the attacker. Research on mass violence shows that mass shooters often cite previous gunmen as inspiration for their acts of violence. The New Zealand shooter mentioned mass murderers who killed worshipers in a Charleston, South Carolina church, and a Norwegian murderer who killed 69 political activists and children at a summer camp.

Our team used Media Cloud, an open-source media collection and analysis tool developed at MIT’s Center for Civic Media and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, to analyze 6,337 stories in 508 national-level English-language news sources in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We found a mix of good and bad news for campaigns such as No Notoriety.

We examined the stories we retrieved for compliance with seven guidelines, compiled from No Notoriety and other campaigns that seek to limit the amplification of terrorist acts through media. While media justice campaigns often seek out journalists as conduits of change, we also expanded our analysis to assess whether internet culture reflects journalistic choices about whether to list the name or ideology of the attacker. We coded for compliance with the following best practices:

Don’t publish the shooter’s name.
Don’t link to or publish the name of the forum that the shooter posted on to promote the attacks.
Don’t link to or publish the name of the shooter’s manifesto.
Don’t describe or detail the shooter’s ideology.
Don’t publish or name specific memes linked to the shooter’s ideology.
Don’t refer to the shooter as a troll or his actions as trolling.
Follow the AP guidelines for using the term “alt-right” (contain it within quotation marks or modify it with language such as “so-called” or “self-described”).

In addition, we coded for stories that focused specifically on the victims or mentioned Islamophobia as a cause in the killings. The graph below shows what guidelines publications in different countries violated.

More: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/christchurch-shooting-media-coverage.php

What we learned from analyzing thousands of stories on the Christchurch shooting

What we learned from analyzing thousands of stories on the Christchurch shooting

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