Nearly 25 years after a mass shooting plunged Columbine High School into the national consciousness, a former principal and two current teachers sat down for interviews with news reporters ahead of the tragedy’s anniversary.
Media Day, organized by the Jefferson County School District as a way to shield teachers and students from a barrage of reporters, offered them a chance to reflect on where journalists went wrong in covering the shooting.
One frustration that still sticks in their minds: News coverage can amplify rumors and misinformation, including the narrative that the two students committed the shooting because they were bullied.
“I think a lot of times, the narrative that was given was not accurate,” said Frank DeAngelis, who served as Columbine’s principal at the time. “And unfortunately, 25 years later, that narrative is still out there.”
In the years since the attack, few events have stopped America in its tracks like that day.
The intervening years have seen school gun incidents on the rise and, in turn, a rise in the frequency in which such events are covered in the news media. And while mass school shootings haven’t necessarily become more common, they’ve taken on a higher death toll.
The way that media covers traumatic events has been debated by readers, scholars and journalists alike, but a few lessons have become clear, as highlighted by those who study coverage of shootings and by those in the Columbine community like DeAngelis: Don’t make the shooters into legends. Don’t unwittingly inspire future killings. Don’t turn the tragedy into myth and misinformation.
University of Colorado Boulder professor Elizabeth Skewes, a media scholar, posits that people have become desensitized to news of mass shootings, and survivors and those impacted indirectly have been retraumatized.
Unfettered access to news at America’s fingertips through smartphones “can make it so that when everything feels dramatic, nothing is dramatic,” Skewes said.
“Any mass shooting is awful,” she said. “Unfortunately, we have so many that they have become almost routine.”
Shooters in the years after the 1999 attack emulated the Columbine killers. University of Connecticut assistant professor Amanda Crawford said that is partly because reporters, whether they meant to or not, glorified the killers. She said journalists should avoid that.
“You can’t underestimate the impact of that news coverage — of that media attention — on our larger ideas about mass shootings, about school shootings, about youth perpetrators, about this ongoing mass shooting crisis,” Crawford said.
Covering the Columbine shooting
The Columbine attack remains a singular event in the canon of mass shootings in the United States, due to a number of factors: the advent of 24-hour news, police protocols of the time period and news coverage that sensationalized the shooters, Skewes said.
“Columbine was really the first televised mass shooting,” Skewes said, adding: “I think a lot of journalists didn’t quite know what to do, even though there had been other mass shootings to some degree.”
Skewes added that the police protocol of the time was to assume criminals take hostages and wait, meaning that news outlets had time to mobilize to the scene but lacked concrete information — leading to rampant speculation.
“This unfolded over hours,” Skewes said. “News organizations could be there to see it unfold and to photograph it as it unfolded too … There was so much misinformation initially.”
John McDonald, formerly executive director of Jeffco School Security from 2008 to 2022, now the chief operating officer for the Council on School Safety Leadership, said the rush to get information out led to the dissemination of faulty narratives, such as incorrect theories about the killer’s backgrounds, becoming widespread.
“The other problem with Columbine is the facts and circumstances surrounding it and the narrative out of the media was so different from the truth because everybody was trying to make sense of the unimaginable,” he said.
Tom Fildey, who was a senior at Evergreen High School and a photojournalism intern at Evergreen Newspapers — which published the Columbine Courier, the area’s local paper, at the time — said that while he rushed to cover the attack, radio stations provided spotty information.
“I raced down the hill, listening to the radio the whole way,” said Fildey, who now works in the production department in our newsroom, which produces two dozen metro area newspapers, including the Littleton Independent. “No information was really becoming available; every station you listened to was telling you something different. It was one person or two shooters, or many shooters and the body count was three, eight, whatever. Everything was all over the place.”
Graphic images circulated widely, while cell phones enabled a flurry of calls to local stations from people promising information to journalists who needed to fill airtime and newspaper pages. That included callers who told TV news stations they were on campus as the incident unfolded, according to a case study by Alicia Shepard, who wrote for the American Journalism Review. One caller who had claimed to be a student at the school turned out to have called from Utah, where he was a 25-year-old snowboarder.
Things were reported “breathlessly” without being properly fact-checked, Skewes said.
Fildey said the commotion at the crime scene left reporters scrambling for photos, quotes and interviews. That frenzied atmosphere hardly dissipated in the weeks and months that followed.
The day of the shooting, “there were helicopters everywhere — police helicopters, news helicopters,” Fildey said. “The next couple of weeks were really just a blur. They had reporters all hanging out with the public information officers trying to get whatever information they could.”
“There was lots of screaming, lots of crying,” Fildey continued. “These people had just come out of a school where they were stepping over their friends’ bodies. And that was kind of just, rinse, wash, repeat. Just try and try and get that photo.”
Fildey said that what followed was “12-hour days, just trying to get photographs of whatever was going on.”
In the days and weeks following the shooting, some of the coverage turned toward the shooters — the cover of Time magazine shortly after the massacre and the corresponding spread centered the perpetrators, not the victims.
“All of the focus was on the shooters,” Skewes said. And “then I think as the days unfolded, there was such an attempt to explain the actions of (the shooters) by who they were — they were goth, they were trench coats, they were this, they were that — and they were none of it.”
The portrayal of the shooters as victims of bullying, amplified by news coverage, may have helped inspire more killings. In his manifesto, the 2007 Virginia Tech shooter referred to the Columbine killers as martyrs.
“Shooters and attempted school shooters followed the Columbine model, so it created this social script,” said Crawford, the assistant journalism professor.
“Of the 12 documented school rampage shootings in the United States between Columbine in 1999 and the end of 2007, eight (66.7%) of the rampagers directly referred to Columbine,” Ralph Larkin of the City University of New York wrote in a 2009 study.
And of the 11 rampage shootings outside the U.S. in that time, six had direct references to the Columbine shooting, the study says.
News outlets like the Rocky Mountain News and Washington Post wrote about bullying, or a culture of mistreatment, at Columbine as a motivation for the shooting. But mental health experts from an FBI summit focused on the conclusion that one of the shooters was a psychopath, according to Dave Cullen, who wrote the book “Columbine,” an examination of the shooting. DeAngelis, Columbine’s former principal, said he viewed the so-called “basement tapes” — home videos made by the shooters — and said they talked about being “superior.”
“The reality is that lots of people are bullied who don’t commit a mass murder, so that’s not a real answer as to why the shooting happened, right?” Crawford said.
Mass shootings by the numbers
The history of modern mass school shootings in the U.S. stretches back at least to the 1966 University of Texas tower shooting, and a number of school shootings occurred in the 1990s before Columbine.
“But Columbine was really the incident that brought this phenomenon into the public consciousness,” Crawford said.
And the way news media covered the Columbine shooting likely fueled imitators.
“A lot of these shooters are trying to become famous. For instance, even with the Las Vegas shooter, the FBI found no motive for the shooting other than a quest for infamy,” Crawford said. “Why do they think mass shootings make you famous in the media? Because it made the Columbine gunmen famous in the media.”
U.S. school gun incidents have become more frequent in the past 25 years and are now at their highest recorded levels — and school mass shootings, although not necessarily increasing in frequency, have become more deadly, according to a March 2024 study in the journal Pediatrics.
An initiative called The Violence Project, with support from the U.S. Department of Justice, created a database of mass shootings from 1966 to 2019. Some main takeaways include:
• The database spanned more than 50 years, yet 20% of the 167 mass shootings in that period occurred in the last five years.
• More than half of the shootings have occurred since 2000 and 33% since 2010.
• Sixteen of the 20 deadliest mass shootings in modern history (i.e., from 1966 through 2019), occurred between 1999 and 2019, and eight of those sixteen occurred between 2014 and 2019.
• The death toll has risen sharply, particularly in the last decade. In the 1970s, mass shootings claimed an average of eight lives per year. From 2010 to 2019, the end of the study period, the average was up to 51 deaths per year.
Though school shootings often dominate media coverage, most mass shootings don’t take place in school settings.
Of mass shootings in the database, about 8% occurred at a K-12 school, with about 5% happening at a college or university.
The impact of covering mass shootings
The advent of smartphones has made it so that large numbers of people are notified when a mass shooting happens — whether it directly impacts them or not. But the rushed-out, breaking stories aren’t always the best versions of the stories. And, though news organizations have learned lessons since Columbine, initial accounts of stories can still be wrong, or triggering.
“I think slower journalism is better journalism,” Skewes said. “I teach at CU and if I get an alert on my phone that says ‘Something is happening on campus, you need to lock down’ and I’m on campus, that’s helpful information because then I know it’s a safety issue.
“But if I get an alert on my phone that is about something at (another CU campus), I can’t do anything about it,” Skewes continued. “All I can do is worry and speculate. And I get little bits and pieces … I think the stuff that comes over social media, over these things we get so instantly, is rarely useful. It’s so often trite — it’s either speculation or some politician saying ‘We don’t know what happened.’”
Skewes said she would instead prefer well-vetted information about what happened that a reporter has taken their time to discern and fact-check.
She also discussed the impact that the Columbine shooting and the mass shootings that have occurred in the wake of it may have had in creating more such events.
“There’s two things they talk about in the literature: One is the contagion effect and the other is the copycat effect,” Skewes said.
Skewes said the “contagion effect” is the noticeable increase in mass shootings in the wake of a prominent one — “a ripple effect, if you will,” she said.
Copycat effects typically refer to imitation of a person’s behavior, while contagion is based on the idea that behaviors can “go viral” and spread through society like diseases, according to an article in the journal American Behavioral Scientist.
McDonald said the fascination with the Columbine shooting still follows the school around, 25 years later.
“Every media story about a school shooting is a Columbine-style shooting,” McDonald said. “So, we have struggled for years to try and get off the radar and it’s a big lift. They still come from around the world, they want to come to the school, it’s a place of fascination for people and all we want to do is educate kids.”
Less emphasis on perpetrators
At Media Day by the Jefferson County School District in early April, Jeff Garkow, a Columbine social studies teacher who was a student at the school from 2002 to 2006, said it seems like there’s less emphasis on perpetrators in media coverage of school shootings now, which he thinks is “hugely positive.”
DeAngelis, who served as Columbine’s principal at the time of the shooting, is glad to see more caution in news coverage of tragedies.
“Media are saying ‘we can’t confirm this,’ and they’re waiting for information,” DeAngelis said.
Sam Bowersox-Daly, another current Columbine teacher, expressed concern that today’s media coverage of shootings often becomes tied to a political issue and what politicians are doing.
“Focusing on Washington after it happens, does that take away from — these are still people,” Bowersox-Daly said.
Garkow remembers the fifth anniversary of the shooting, when MTV News reporters offered to pay for Qdoba burritos if students would do an interview, he said.
“The media was chasing kids around, like trying to corner us at lunch,” Garkow said.
DeAngelis and Christy, the current principal, both sighed with relief when asked whether Media Day helps them. DeAngelis said the phone used to ring off the hook, especially during the 20th anniversary. This year, he’d only received one call from a national reporter as of Media Day. For Christy, it’s helpful for keeping reporters away from the campus and preventing them from interrupting the school day.
‘A time for extreme sensitivity’
“Back then, it wasn’t the same as it is now,” Fildey said. “I think (journalists) bring a lot more empathy to our work (now).”
Fildey recalled being at a memorial service shortly after the massacre when a group of about 12 survivors huddled together in a moment of solidarity. In the center of the circle, a photographer lay on the ground, wide angle lens pointing up at traumatized teens.
“Great photo,” Fildey said. “But man, that’s kind of an invasion.”
Many journalists at the time adopted a “gallows humor” attitude towards the tragedies they covered, Fildey said, hoping to protect themselves from the lasting impacts of the horrors they covered with a “war mentality.”
“It kind of made the photographers come off as calloused and ‘nothing can bother us,’” Fildey said. “That’s the kind of mentality I was trying to adopt as well. But over the course of the weeks and months afterward, that feeling of ‘Do I really want to be doing this?’ crept in very slowly.”
Skewes is working with University of Dayton Professor Katie Alaimo on a book about media coverage of mass shootings, and said she was prompted to do so after the 2012 Aurora theater shooting.
In the immediate aftermath of that shooting, Skewes turned on the local news and saw an anchor say that out of respect for the families of the victims and survivors, the network would not talk about the shooter unless there was some major court case and development that necessitated coverage.
“I was caught by that in the sense that I thought it made perfect sense in many ways,” Skewes said. “And then I kind of thought, ‘Well, except that if we can’t talk about the shooter, we can’t talk about the systemic failures that occurred and what prevented people from reporting concerns that they had.’”
Sources of online content other than the news media could influence shooters too, Skewes said.
“I don’t know that covering (or not covering) a shooter is going to make a potential other shooter say, ‘Oh, so now I could be famous, or infamous,’” Skewes said. “I think (potential shooters) get a lot of reinforcement from the places they go on the web and the dark web.”
In the era of social media, details about shootings can spread even if the news media doesn’t publish them, Crawford said.
“But we can’t overestimate, even in this society, the agenda-setting role of the media is still prominent. And if you want to be a mainstream celebrity, you’re not going to get there with 4Chan posts,” Crawford said.
Journalists may not want to entirely avoid a shooter’s name since it can provide a reference point for researchers and historians in the future, Crawford said.
“As someone who studies misinformation, I also recognize that if the media failed to ever identify a shooter, that could feed the inevitable conspiracy theories about these tragedies even more,” Crawford said.
But “most of the stories should not include the shooter’s name, and there is no reason to use the name repeatedly in a story,” said Crawford, who thinks the news media has gotten better about not focusing on the killers.
Despite some improvement, the media still shows up and “inundates a town” after a mass shooting, as it did covering the Columbine tragedy, Crawford said.
She advises against “endless hours of news coverage, even when there is almost no confirmed facts or new information to share. That kind of coverage serves no one and just extends the trauma of the event.”
Skewes recommends giving the families of victims time in the aftermath of shootings but keeping them in the loop about a news outlet’s future plans for coverage.
“In the immediate aftermath, or coming up on an anniversary of a shooting, is a time for extreme sensitivity,” Skewes said. “Beyond that, when you need to do these kinds of stories (about the shooter), reach out to victims’ advocacy organizations and say ‘We’re going to do this, do you want to be a part of the story?’ And if not, that’s OK.
“But we want to let you know we’re doing it so that when you see it when it comes out, you’re not surprised and you’re not caught off guard,” Skewes continued. “Give them as much of a heads up if you can, because I think there’s kind of a gut punch to picking up a paper and finding your life in it again, or seeing something on the news.”