"Terrorism" is a rich field, and we shouldn't shy from its macabre quality. We have the right to overturn rocks, look underneath, and make our own determinations for what's actually happening.
What makes you say that? I literally just described their output with the word "barf". Granted, human vomit is definitely food on its way to being chemically simplified, but I don't think that's the connotation you had in mind.
> I believe in the people fortifying and defending themselves with competence.
Competence is good, but it does NOT come from a breathless 24/7 media obsession over a big scary "SHOOTERMAGEDDON" animated title and constant loops of gruesome footage, nor from the interspersed speculation over "hints" in facebook and twitter feeds.
In fact, forget the advertising, novelty-appeal, or emotional-appeal, it does something evne worse: It instills a FALSE sense of competence in the viewers. (Seriously, there are studies, look 'em up.)
> 99.9% of us will never have expertise
1. Of the entire audience being catered-to, almost none of them will have the inclination/money/time to become meaningful experts in violent mass-shootings.
2. The kind of information crafted by the mass-media is too low-quality to assist anybody towards that goal anyway.
3. People who are interested or competent in the field will instead acquire their data through entirely different mechanisms anyway.
4. The mass-media coverage is actually counter-productive to the goal of competence. In the search for filler, it is increasingly likely to host terrible "experts" or to portray news-anchors as experts. Among viewers, it creates "armchair experts" after 5 minutes, instilling them with a false sense of competence.
5. Finally, the popular style of mass-media coverage harms society in general, through encouraging additional unstable individuals to act.
Being informed is almost always better.
The point is that media is making mass killers into celebrities and that encourages more sick (read depressed, lonely) people to perform acts like this.
I think you have it totally backwards. If anything, it's "sexy" for news agencies to barf out everything they can know or speculate about the person. It lets them grab eyeballs, ratings, and fill airtime and pages.
In contrast, removing the "notoriety payoff" is the sober, serious, and "wise" approach for society. There's a huge correlation between media-obsession after a shooting-tragedy and another attack occurring soon afterwards. [0]
> We need to delve
No, "we", the media-consuming audience, emphatically do NOT need to do any delving. 99.9% of us will never have expertise, and even if we did would be unable to act upon it.
The people who do (sociologists, psychologists, etc.) are going to be able to get at the data anyway, they don't need to get their primary research from the 24-hour flashing-klaxon news-blast.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4&t=1m39s