The Masses
In January 2020 I was in production directing a feature documentary, “The Masses”, about shootings in America. I left for Minnesota days before the pandemic to begin interviewing subjects on the topic that ranged from clinical psychologists and crisis mitigators to the actual shooters. Our goal had been to interview those around the events and see if we could find patterns of where the breakdown happened. When interviewing people around this topic it was clear that most of the shooters had told multiple people, but no one intervened until it was too late. While this documentary has yet to be finished due to the global pandemic, I wanted to take a moment to speak about the media’s involvement in society.
In the weeks leading up to the shutdown of the country, I would end up interviewing half a dozen people around a shooting in the state of Iowa many years previous. A young man stole his grandfather’s gun and ended up shooting two store clerks in two different small towns in Iowa. As my crew and I started to research these events, we landed on a clip from the trial that was everywhere. A teenage boy in a flack jacket, hands cuffed behind his back, a slight smile on his face, and two cops leading him into the courtroom. A 15-second clip that showed so much for the audience and informed the viewer of what this young man had done.
A few days later we sat down for a full day with his mother to discuss the family’s history and learn about what happened. A story that until this point had only been clear to us through the media’s lens. Until meeting the mother we had not seen any interviews except for a reality tv crew's recreation of the events and the local news teams’ coverage of the trial, including the aforementioned clip. Over multiple hours we talked and learned about the family and how many times they had asked for help, and then the phone rang. It was an incoming call “From an inmate…”, and we took the next 30 minutes to talk to that teenage boy, now a young man from prison.
Up to this point, we had contacted multiple media outlets that covered the event all of which denied or did not respond to a request to be interviewed. The local newspaper also passed, as well as the judge that convicted this man. The man and his mother took time to catch up and then asked me if I had any questions. I have never talked to anyone in prison, especially a convicted murderer. This was all new to me, but I needed to know about that clip I had seen. I asked him about the infamous clip from when he was a teenager and he took a moment to answer my questions. He told me about all of the press requests he has received in prison, all of the news stations asking for an interview, which was much higher than I had expected, and then he told me the story for that clip I had seen. He informed me that the cameraman was walking backward while filming him and almost fell over, and then a teenager laughed. A normal response for a teenager had it not been a charged murderer in a flack jacket and orange jumpsuit.
As stated above, the news station didn’t respond to our request for an interview so we do not know if the camera person fell or not, but what we do know is they didn’t want to talk to us about it. The media cycle is so formulaic that we get to see it every week in America. A violent crime happens the media floods with sensationalized footage and then they disappear. The ad revenue comes in and the next event happens but what does the real data show? Below are the Pew Research statistics from the past couple of years. The left shows murder rates per 100,000 people and the right is focused on violent crimes in America.
The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.”
-Neil Postman-
Amusing Ourselves to Death
As humans, we make decisions in our life that shape how society, and those involved in society, interact. Neil Postman writes about this in his 1985 book entitled “Amusing Ourselves To Death”, a book that presents us with the possible negative aspects of 24 news cycles and endless news coverage. Is it an individual responsibility to fact-check the news or the news outlets? What would happen if we didn’t show the manifestos? What would happen if we listened to those that speak up early and look into things? If we labeled news vs. opinion, would anything change? I’m not sure but that was the point of our documentary “The Masses”1. It’s up to us to decide what the future looks like, but I think it looks better than the media shows us.
As of 2023 “The Masses” is still interviewing those affected, or involved in violence prevention.
This is a great insight into some of the issues with the current media machine. How telling that the news organizations refused to talk to you. An example of how things can be taken out of context and sensationalized to fit a narrative.