Germanwings Flight 9525 from Barcelona to Dusseldorf carrying 144 passengers and six crew members on board crashed in a remote area near Digne-les-Bains in the Alpes de Haute-Provence region on 24 March 2015. The world was shocked. Germanwings is a low-cost airline with almost perfect safety record. Since the airline became a part of Lufthansa Group in 2009, there was only one recorded incident in December 2010, no one died.
The search team did a very good job to recover the plane’s black-box. Investigation started soon. A suicidal co-pilot somehow locked the pilot out of cockpit while he brought down the plane. He committed suicide, bringing 149 other people along with him.
It is a tragedy.
What I do not understand is… for the following few days, many major newspapers and news sites intensively published stories of this suicidal co-pilot. His name became famous and his photos are everywhere. My Facebook newsfeed was full of his photos, even photos of him as teenagers. Suddenly media created a new popular person. A person whose name was nowhere near world-famous, suddenly becomes somebody, everyone knows him.
Few people knows the name of the pilot who tried to save the plane. Even fewer people knows the name of the passengers and other crews.
THIS is what’s wrong with today’s media.
This time, they are talking about a crashed flight. In 2014 they had Marysville Pilchuck High School shooting; in 2013 they had Boston Marathon bombings; in 2012 they had Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting. I can continue this long list, but you get what I mean. In all those cases, the mass murderers got their reward: instant fame. They changed from nobody to somebody everyone knows. What most people know about the victims is… how many died. Yes, the murderers got famous name, the victims became part of a number. A statistic. The bigger the number of victims, the more attention this murderer got. Heck these murderers even get their dedicated Wikipedia entries. Very ironic, isn’t it?
Did anyone realise that making these crazy murderers famous would only encourage more to do the same? Frustrated people who think they would choose to die as someone famous (even for a bad reason) rather than live miserably as nobody.
Instead of making a mass murderer famous, how about posting more news about the victims?
Tell the world their stories, who they are, share the good things they have done in life, what the world could possibly lose from their deaths. Treat them as human beings, not as numbers.
Investigations are needed to prevent future tragedies, but mainstream media can still report investigation results by treating the mass murderer as nobody. Use the terms like “the killer from X” instead of mention his name. Keep him as nobody so no one would remember him. THAT shall discourage a lot of others who think like them to commit even bigger crime.
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