Covering Mass Murder: An Experimental Examination of the Effect of News Focus—Killer, Victim, or Hero—on Reader Interest:

Journalists often assume that consumers are drawn to stories of mass murder because of their morbid curiosity. As a result, cable television reports and news stories tend to focus on details of the killer’s biography and modus operandi, possibly neglecting aspects of an incident that could provide consumers with practical knowledge for preventing a massacre and, at the same time, would not inspire future killers looking for fame and celebrity. For this study, we manipulated the news focus of a story about a high school rampage—putting it on the killer, the first victim, or a heroic figure who ended the violence—in an experiment conducted via Qualtrics survey software with a sample of 212 U.S. adults. Additional independent variables in the analysis included respondents’ gender, age, and degree of fear. The dependent variable consisted of a measure of respondents’ interest in reading a news story about the school shooting. Results from a four-way analysis of variance indicated that subjects were significan...