Simon's Rock Shooting Survivors Protest StoryCorps Piece
As mass shootings have proliferated in this country, so has the debate over how much focus news organizations should put on the shooters versus the victims.
Some argue the shooters should never be named to avoid giving them any notoriety they crave. But news organizations also have an obligation to provide information (who is the shooter and why did he or she act?). If they fail to commemorate the anniversaries of such deadly acts, they will inevitably get complaints, too, but it's hard to tell the story of what happened without at some point getting into some specificity as to what happened. NPR's current policy, which calls for judicious use of killers' names, can be found here.
Into this debate dropped two recent pieces NPR carried between the imprisoned killer, Wayne Lo, and Greg Gibson, the father of one victim, heard on ; the was heard on the actual anniversary, Dec. 14, on , and included some of Gibson's thoughts on the conversation, but no audio of Lo.
