Virginia shooting proves Americans aren’t numb to tragedy — we just have a higher tolerance for it

For decades, members of the news media have struggled to determine whether a gruesome photograph or video crosses the line from newsworthy to something so disturbing that it is potentially harmful.

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Pretty much every major news organization agreed that the video of two Virginia journalists shot on live television Wednesday fell on the latter side of that fine line, and those that didn’t were subjected to heavy criticism and ridicule for giving undue attention to shooter Vester Lee Flanagan, who clearly wanted his violent act to be seen. But while airing the video on TV and online news outlets certainly would have helped Flanagan gain publicity, refusing to do so didn’t shield the unsuspecting viewers who tuned in to watch WDBJ and, without warning, were forced to witness as reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward were killed.

In the wake of the shooting, some media experts have called for TV news producers to reevaluate the necessity of live broadcasts and embrace the kind of delay technology used in radio and widely viewed events like the Oscars and the Super Bowl.

“We have had the technology to delay live shots for decades. It is time to use it — not just when you are covering a hostage standoff or a car chase,” Al Tompkins, a veteran journalist and senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, wrote Wednesday. “Whole YouTube channels now show collections of reporters being insulted, assaulted and kissed while trying to do their jobs live on the air. Profanity and nudity are quite common, and we shrug it off with a ‘who knew that would happen’ look.”

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But a delayed broadcast wouldn’t have prevented Flanagan from posting his own first-person video of the shooting on Facebook and Twitter, allowing it to spread quickly across both social networking sites before his accounts were disabled.

The swift effectiveness of Flanagan’s multiplatform assault raised questions about social media’s role in filtering out inappropriate content from the masses — a responsibility historically borne by traditional news outlets — and what, exactly, that entails.

Over the past several years, a number of studies have traced growing desensitization to violence among Americans to increased media exposure to it. It makes sense. With the evolution of the Internet, social media, and the 24-hour news cycle coinciding with a dramatic rise in mass shootings, for example, it would be impossible for every mass shooting to elicit the same kind of public outpouring of grief and fear seen in the wake of Columbine.

“The moment we see something that registers concern, the less concerned we become,” said Erica Scharrer, a communications professor at the University of Massachusetts who has studied the effects of media exposure on people’s sensitivity to violent news reports.

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That’s not necessarily a bad thing, Scharrer explained. “It’s a coping mechanism. We can’t go around being worried about everything.”

But “one unfortunate consequence of the 24-hour news cycle is the feeling that we’ve seen everything,” she said. “Another tragedy might not spark the response it would if we had not been so often exposed to some of these images.”

Still, Scharrer said, the outrage prompted by the sheer horror of two murders being broadcast on live television without warning or delay is proof that Americans haven’t become totally numb to tragedy — we just have a higher tolerance for it.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than a third of all women in the U.S. have been the victims of intimate partner violence at some point in their lives. But it wasn’t until TMZ published a security camera video of former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice knocking his fiancée, Janay Palmer, unconscious in a hotel elevator that this pervasive problem became the subject of national conversation.

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For many people, the video provided a disturbing look at the realities of what had long been considered a private and misunderstood matter. The video raised awareness about domestic violence and put public pressure on the NFL to hold Rice accountable for behavior to which — had it not been caught on tape — they could have easily turned the other cheek.

“Sometimes we need to remember that violence is terrible,” Scharrer said, pointing to the April death of Walter Scott in South Carolina as another example.

Seven months after Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, reports of police killing unarmed black men seemed to be surfacing almost weekly, with little to no consequences to be spoken of. Yet when the New York Times published a cellphone video of police officer Michael Slager shooting 50-year-old Walter Scott eight times in the back as he ran away, unarmed, after being pulled over for a broken taillight, the outrage that first launched protests across Ferguson was reinvigorated nationwide. And Slager was indicted.

“I thought, it’s both terrible that the video is there and also maybe of service because it’s easy enough to forget that violence ruins lives when we’re not confronted with some of the particulars,” Scharrer said.

She noted that Tuesday’s on-air shooting has galvanized gun control advocates, including victim Alison Parker’s father, who has vowed to fight for stricter gun laws.

“Would we be having that if we didn’t have this visual?” Scharrer asked. “Sometimes it takes shocking and upsetting things to make change occur.”

Colin Goddard hopes the shock of this latest shooting will motivate change, but he’s skeptical. A survivor of the deadly shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007, Goddard is now a senior policy adviser at the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.

He told Yahoo News and Finance Anchor Bianna Golodryga on Thursday that the video of Vester Flanagan firing on two young Virginia journalists “was a small glimpse into the horror of what a real shooting is like, and it brought me right back to my French class at Virginia Tech.”

He said that while he doesn’t want to give the gunman notoriety, he thinks the video is important for people to see in order to better understand the issue of gun violence.

“People will talk about statistics, and they have their talking points, but moments like that makes us realize how intense the reality of gun violence in America is and what a shooting is really like,” Goddard said. “That should be front and center when it comes to the conversation on what we can do about this and how we can act to prevent the next shooting from happening to somebody else.”

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