Stop school shootings -- ban media outlets?

During a recent speech in Sacramento, Bill Clinton reportedly said (according to my mother, who was there) that when natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy hit, people first tune to CNN to find out "what really happened" then turn back to Fox News or MSNBC, depending on their political persuasion. But the self-proclaimed "most trusted name in news" apparently isn't as reliable when it comes to mass shootings at schools.

So opines John Hinderaker of Power Line. He writes:

Desperate to profit by satisfying the public’s thirst for information about the Sandy Hook murders, news outlets–just about all of them, as far as I can tell–rushed to publicize “facts” that turned out to be largely wrong. They reported that Ryan Lanza was a mass murderer, when in fact he is a respectable accountant who learned of the murders–and his own alleged responsibility–via CNN, while working in his office in Times Square.

They reported that the killer’s younger brother was found in the woods after the murders, and was hauled out while protesting his innocence. Adam Lanza didn’t have a younger brother, and we have heard nothing further about this second person who supposedly had something to do with the killings. They told us that Nancy Lanza was a kindergarten teacher at Sandy Hook and was murdered in her classroom, along with her students. It turned out that she had no connection to Sandy Hook and was shot at home as she lay in her bed, likely asleep. They reported, entirely falsely, that Lanza had murdered his father in New Jersey. On fact after fact, the news media turned out to be wrong. Likely more errors will emerge over time.

The broader and more important question relates to the news media’s responsibility for Sandy Hook and similar incidents. As I wrote here, it seems rather obvious that mass murderers like Adam Lanza are inspired in part by a desire for fame, which our news media are happy to supply. That is why these incidents feed off one another, as we have seen in recent weeks. Newspaper editorialists demand that we engage in “soul-searching” after a mass murder like Sandy Hook, but why? You and I could search our souls forever and come up with no connection to the crime. But our newspapers and television stations really ought to search their souls and consider whether they are encouraging spectacular, deadly crimes, and if so, how they can reform their own conduct.

Apparently CNN was far from the only offender. According to Hinderaker, one of the most egregious accounts came from the Associated Press (imagine that), which spared no breathless hysteria in declaring the shooter could have killed "just about every student in the school" had the cops not shown up.

Look, if you want my two cents, I think incidents like Friday's shooting are the best arguments for homeschooling there ever were. School violence aside, most parents have no clue the kind of environment they're subjecting their children to when they drop them off at a public school. I heard about one first-grader a couple of years ago here in the Redding area who suffered through an asthma attack for nearly an hour because the school secretary was "too busy" to give him a puff of his own inhaler.

But I think it's rich when I hear about TV networks going all self-righteous on us over gun violence when as many people get killed in one episode of "Revolution" as were targeted on Friday. If we're going to start banning certain classes of firearms because of school shootings, let's be fair; perhaps we should ban certain classes of media, too. Fortunately we have a Constitution (at least for now) that prevents the government from doing such a thing, so we'll have to do it ourselves as consumers.