Writing about TV is a privilege and a joy 99% of the time. Even if the show is bad, part of your paycheck goes toward getting to sit in your favorite living room chair with a cold drink in one hand and a remote in the other.
This is one of those 1% moments. It’s a moment that’s sad, angering, senseless, and sure to divide our already divided populace even further. Once again, the response to and coverage of an already difficult moment just made an already dark chapter of our country even worse.
Political activist and pundit Charlie Kirk, co-founder of the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA, died on Wed, Sep 10, during one of the many public debates he held on college campuses across the nation. During an appearance at Utah Valley University, he was killed by a rooftop gunman with a bolt-action rifle in the middle of a public debate in front of a crowd of 3,000 students. President Donald Trump announced confirmation of Kirk’s death just over two hours later on Truth Social.
The shocking news of Kirk’s assassination and death brought a news cycle already churning with controversy to a total halt. Pretty much everyone on TV who talks about news for more than five minutes a day shifted focus to Kirk’s assassination, with 24-hour coverage and reactions from pundits and commentators, and the latest updates on a possible suspect, some without regard for their validity or confirmation.
I disagree with the vast majority of Kirk’s views that strayed and sometimes boldly strolled into racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic territory. However, Kirk did not deserve this. His wife didn’t deserve to lose her husband. His kids didn’t deserve to grow up without their father. No one deserves to die for expressing an opinion, no matter how abhorrent it may seem to anyone else. I’m not the first person to express this sentiment after Kirk’s assassination. As long as gun violence continues to grow, and we continue to grow numb to it, it can’t be said enough, regardless of who dies from it.
Unfortunately, we live in times so divisive and splintered that even our media serves to further separate us instead of informing us or challenging our ways of thinking. We don’t just watch the news. We consume it to fuel our identity. It doesn’t help that our country’s highest levels of leadership are currently either overwhelmed by the job for which they were appointed or interested only in finding scapegoats to paint political enemies.
The one angle in the aftermath that hasn’t even been touched is how that information is delivered to us.
The 24-hour TV news cycle seems more focused on speed and being the first to report new details instead of ensuring accuracy before pouring “the facts” into a teleprompter. This isn’t unique to our times. Journalism has always been a competitive industry among reporters, and yellow journalism was present long before America became a democracy. Cable TV news has become a delivery vehicle for shouting matches disguised as necessary discourse, and unconfirmed internet gossip transforms into important breaking news.
Celebrity is one of those stories that can really grind our news media to a halt, especially on nonstop TV feeds. Kirk’s murder is worthy of coverage, not just to ensure his loved ones obtain justice for their loss. His assassination is also sure to have a profound effect on the growth of more heated rhetoric, divisiveness, and even public policy, without the way it’s being reported. Kirk’s life is just as worthy of attention as anyone else’s that is senselessly ended or affected by gun violence, but the pendulum is supposed to swing both ways.
Every detail of Kirk’s assassin, including some that still require corrections and fact checks, swallowed up so much national news media time that news of other needless gun deaths, injuries, and incidents didn’t get nearly the same amount of coverage. This isn’t Kirk’s fault, and I want to make it clear that I’m not suggesting such a thing in any way. It’s a symptom of a larger problem in TV news, especially on the national level.
The Gun Violence Archive says three mass shootings occurred in the span of five days (Mon, Sep 15, as of this writing) in Tampa, Chicago, and Minneapolis. One person in Tampa was killed, and 20 people were injured as a result of all three shootings. A fourth mass shooting occurred in San Francisco the day before Kirk’s death, causing six injuries. So far, no suspects have been arrested in any of those cases.
The number of school-related gun incidents in the same period is even more alarming. The Gun Violence Archive lists 13 other gun incidents at schools in just five days across 12 different states. These incidents caused six injuries and resulted in 12 arrests, including the person who allegedly committed the shooting that caused Kirk’s death. The day before the Utah college campus shooting, the archive listed nine additional gun-related incidents, causing two injuries and leading to six arrests.
One of the school incidents in those six days includes an incident at a high school in Colorado that started to gain national attention but waned in the wake of Kirk’s death. The Colorado suspect (whom I’m not naming because criminology research and articles published in journals like American Behavioral Scientist show news outlets that do so only glorify people who seek such infamy) “spent substantial amounts of time in online spaces featuring extremist ideologies” and frequented an online “gore forum” where he posted comments about other high-profile mass shootings. The same forum also hosted accounts for “several mass attackers” linked to at least two identified school shooters responsible for killing five people, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
These incidents that occurred in the shadow of Kirk’s story mostly received coverage from local news entities but not nearly as much in the national media cycle and certainly not as much or with the same frequency.
There are limits that the news can cover, even on a 24-hour news cycle. It’s unreasonable to ask even the most dedicated newsroom to be on top of every incident of every news day. However, it should also be concerning and worthy of coverage that so many gun incidents, especially so many in schools, can’t be covered with the same depth by the same billion-dollar media companies with access to airwaves, the internet, and a global viewership. It doesn’t present to or inform the public about the full scope of violence in our country. It’s hard to see how any media outlet could do such a thing if Kirk’s death never happened.
I don’t have the answer, but we’ll never find it if we can’t even see the full depth of the problem.
Short and to the point — exactly what I needed today.