Mass Murder, LLC

On my first staff job at a newspaper, 36 years ago, my editor asked me why murder was news. “It’s not unusual,” he said. “It happens every day — more than once an hour in the United States. Why is it news?”

Charlie Hand was the best news editor I ever had. He taught me more in two days about reporting, writing, editing and the news business than I ever learned from anyone else. But I haven’t found an answer to Charlie’s question.

Were he alive today, I am sure Charlie would ask: “Why is mass murder news? At a shopping center or anywhere else? Or whether the butthead bought the guns legally or not? It happens almost every day. Why is it news?”

I answered Charlie’s first question by saying, “Well, it affects people in the community.” (We worked on a chain of weeklies in Southern California.)

“So what?” Charlie said. “So does a lost dog. People go out and look for it. Maybe they’ll find it and bring it back home and meet their neighbors. That’s more than they’ll do for a murder.”

I was new at this. I thought I knew what news was, and wasn’t. I accepted that for a community weekly the schools’ Honor Roll could be news. So did Charlie. Though to tell the truth, we used the Honor Roll to fill up the news hole on deadline when we needed it, because the publisher wouldn’t let Charlie hire another reporter.

Many’s the time that Charlie and I put out those four weekly papers by ourselves, on a long Wednesday night and early Thursday. One early morning, stoked with Generic Beer, we faced a 17-inch news hole on an inside page, and we both desperately needed to go home. What were we going to … 

“Ah hah!” Charlie hollered, waving two sheets of paper like a Victory Flag: “We’ve got the Honor Roll!”

One service of local news is to let parents clip out stories and paste them into the family album. There is nothing ignoble about that.

But who would clip and paste Grandma’s murder into a family album? No. The family might clip the story, but hide it apart, in a slim drawer of a desk.

Not that we didn’t report on local murders. Of course we did. Because it’s news. As we know it.

Pulling the lens back, why should any newspaper — local, statewide or national — spill ink to direct attention to yesterday’s murders — even a mass murder — that happened hundreds of miles away from their readers?

That’s not news. That’s daily life in the United States.

I would say that an inflammatory disease that affects milch cows’ teats, decreasing their milk production by, oh, say 9%, would have more direct effect upon your average reader (“Milk Prices Rise Again, by 11%”) than a murder far away — even a mass murder — no matter who the victims were: children, women, Jews, Muslims, bystanders.

So what’s the big deal about murder? Millions of people love to watch “police procedurals” on TV, in which the lure is not, supposedly, the murder itself, but how the clever detectives figure it out. (And have sex with one another on the side. (Not news.))

We have learned to live with intrusive bullies like Bezos and Zuckerman snooping so deeply into everything we do online that if I buy a garlic press from Amazon, two microseconds later, Bezos is trying to sell me a salad spinner. 

And frankly, that is more annoying to me than the murder of a family 1,000 miles away. I’ll read the murder story; I don’t want to see the ad.

Like so many things in the United States today — hungry people sleeping on sidewalks, driven to crime through desperation; rape and politics (same thing); corporate governance (same thing) — murder has been reduced to entertainment. And we’ve accepted it — so long as it doesn’t happen to us. And if it does, well, too late for us.

If a family is murdered two or three towns down the pike … well, ain’t that a shame? Turn the page to the Entertainment section to check out the new movies. And what do we see? Well, well, well … murders in every damn one of them. 

In the declining days of the Roman Empire, sybaritic emperors had the (moderately) good taste to confine murder (ostensibly) to the Colosseum (admission free). Today we put murder on TV (practically free) and in our movies (streaming online!).

Humans are the apex predator species of an entire planet. We are eating each other alive. We are tossing our neighbors — and distant neighbors we will never meet — into graves we’ve been digging for them for years — no, making them dig their own graves. And our own.

So, cribbing from Charlie Hand — may he rest in peace — I ask you: Why is mass murder in the United States by a heavily armed white man news anymore? It happens all the time.

That’s not news. That’s our daily life. And we voted it in — year after year after year.