By Cat Carroll
Over two decades after the Columbine High School shooting on April 20, 1999, survivor Amy Over decided to share her story of what happened.
She agreed to host the podcast series “Confronting: Columbine,” a project that brought her back to the building where she hid under a lunchroom table and gave her the opportunity to speak with fellow survivors, first responders and community members.
But most importantly, it was a chance for Over to control her own narrative for a change.
In the process, she helped bring focus to an ethical issue facing reporters covering tragedies such as school shootings: how to gather information without worsening trauma and exploiting survivors.
A senior at the time of the shooting, Over recalls a reporter asking her to do an interview as she escaped the building, searching for safety. That night, she watched on-air journalists inaccurately report the number of her peers and teachers who had been killed. She said journalists reported the death toll at 40, then 30. The next day, the death toll was reported to be 13, excluding the two killers.
In the days that followed, multiple news outlets approached Over for interviews, even after she told them she was too traumatized to speak about what she had experienced.
“The media really invaded and was intrusive of our privacy … There were literally reporters jumping out of bushes to have a conversation with us,” Over says in the first episode of the series. “We were grieving in a fishbowl.”
April 2024 marked 25 years since Columbine. In those 25 years, there have been 417 school shootings, exposing more than 383,000 students to gun violence at school, according to The Washington Post.
While the industry’s understanding of how to ethically cover trauma and gun violence has evolved since 1999 – thanks in part to the work of organizations such as the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting (PCGVR) and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma – firearm violence across the U.S. remains on the rise, and journalists continue to face ethical challenges reporting on the issue.
Protecting children and getting it right
Ashley Yuckenberg was a freshman in high school when Columbine happened and eight years later, peers from her own high school were killed in the Virginia Tech shooting.
These experiences shaped the trajectory of her career, leading the trained journalist and current assistant professor at George Mason University to focus her 2021 dissertation on the ethical dilemmas of crisis coverage.
Yuckenberg said many journalists who reported on Columbine asked individuals who were leaving the building for interviews. This practice raises serious ethical concerns, according to Katherine Reed, director of education and content at the Association of Health Care Journalists.
“What kind of harm is done to people who are involved in an event that is already deeply disturbing and terrifying? They’re grieving, they may be injured, they may have suffered a loss,” Reed said. “And then the media enters the picture.”
Reed said journalists must consider the state of students in the aftermath of a school shooting, emphasizing that they are children who are in a state of shock and disorientation. She said an individual in such a state cannot appropriately consent to an interview. Such interviews can also prolong separation between a child and their parents, creating further trauma for children.
Coverage of school shootings presents unique challenges for journalists because of the intersection of children and trauma. Reed stressed that protecting children should be journalists’ primary focus, with careful attention paid to avoiding both immediate and long-term harm.
Yuckenberg pointed out that rushing to interview student witnesses after Columbine had other negative consequences – the spread of misinformation as students shared speculative, non-primary information with reporters.
In response to these challenges, Yuckenberg advocates for slow journalism in the event of a school shooting. This may mean releasing information in a controlled manner, waiting until facts are confirmed. It can also mean giving a story an additional read-through prior to publication, focusing on neutral language and contemplating which perspectives are not being included.
“There’s this balance we have to play as journalists that’s very important because we are there to share information with the public, and you want them to have the whole story, and we want to get it right,” Yuckenberg said. “There’s a lot of pressure to get it right.”
An ‘editorial and ethical minefield’
Founder and director of PCGVR Jim MacMillan said most reporting on firearm violence at large remains episodic, focusing on one single event, rather than firearm violence as a larger issue.
To move away from this, Yuckenberg recommends newsrooms focus on the community affected in the days and weeks following a school shooting. She warns against sensationalized reporting focusing on killers, and urges newsroom leaders to always ask themselves what the purpose of covering something is.
This may mean following guidelines outlined in the No Notoriety initiative, which urges the media to report responsibly on individuals who commit or attempt acts of mass violence for the sake of public safety. The initiative, backed by several gun violence prevention organizations, aims to “reduce rampage acts of mass violence due to media-inspired fame,” according to the website.
Though research on whether media coverage causes a “contagion” effect is mixed, the No Notoriety initiative recommends limiting the use of a killer’s name and photo, elevating the names of victims and survivors and promoting data and analysis by experts in mental health and public safety.
Yuckenberg also recommends reporting on community initiatives to support survivors and giving readers solutions to address firearm violence. She urges journalists to continue investigating in the aftermath of a shooting to provide the community with answers.
Such continued investigation is what led Texas-based journalist Tony Plohetski to obtain images and video from inside Robb Elementary, where the 2022 Uvalde school shooting took place. The footage showed law enforcement officers pacing and checking their phones, but not entering the classroom where there was an active shooter.
Plohetski, who works jointly with the Austin-American Statesman and ABC affiliate KVUE-TV, made the decision with newsroom leaders to publish the video, a decision he later said “brought an editorial and ethical minefield.”
The video was released in two versions, one that was edited to just over four minutes and highlights critical moments and one that shows the entire 77-minute video. In both videos, the identity of a child was blurred and the sound of children screaming as the gunman entered the classroom was removed because it was considered too graphic.
In a letter to readers released the same day as the video, Statesman executive editor Manny Garcia described the decision to publish the video.
“We have to bear witness to history, and transparency with unrelenting reporting is a way to bring change,” Garcia wrote. “This tragedy has been made further tragic by changing stories, heroic-sounding narratives proven to be false, and a delay or in most cases rejection of media requests for public information by law enforcement leaders, public officials and elected leaders.”
At the end of the letter, Garcia added, “We are all aligned for the truth.”
Room for industry-wide change
In navigating the challenges of this coverage, Yuckenberg said newsroom outlets must be diligent and follow updated guidelines and research to ensure harm continues to be minimized.
“It’s important for newspapers and television stations to stay on top of that change so we’re updating our standards constantly,” Yuckenberg said.
While journalists face ethical challenges in covering school shootings, these events account for just one area of firearm violence requiring appropriate reporting. June 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General declared firearm violence a public health issue – something Reed said the media industry must consider in coverage.
Reed recommends newsrooms report on firearm violence under a public health model, shifting away from reflexive reporting to focus more on covering prevention and raising awareness. This means covering firearm violence before tragedy happens.
At PCGVR, MacMillan is applying these lessons through several initiatives that address firearm violence in all its forms.
“We’re collaborating to advance more empathetic, ethical and impactful reporting – and that includes harm prevention,” MacMillan said.
The organization’s research has revealed patterns across different types of firearm violence coverage, identifying both harmful practices and opportunities for improvement. These findings inform training sessions where journalists learn to apply the public health model to all firearm violence reporting.
PCGVR’s upcoming “Survivor Connection” program will make available a database including survivors who can thoughtfully share their experiences with the media, having received training in trauma education and media literacy. All participants are over the age of 18, ensuring ethical engagement while giving survivors control over their narratives, MacMillan said.
Reclaiming control over her narrative has been central to Over’s healing journey over the past 25 years. In her role with Survivors Path, she speaks to local and national organizations, educators, law enforcement, nonprofits and mental health care workers about navigating the aftermath of mass trauma. In the process, she has made multiple media appearances.
Newsrooms such as The Trace and Billy Penn at WHYY have also worked to give survivors the space to control their narratives. This has started to shift the journalistic standard for reporting on firearm violence, but MacMillan said there’s still a long way to go.
“I think progress is good, and we see a great deal more reporting demonstrating best practices,” MacMillan said. “But most of the reporting we see is what I would call harmful, episodic reporting.”
Resources for journalists:
- Download the PCGVR Better Gun Violence Reporting toolkit here
- Tips: Responsible Media Coverage of Crisis Events Impacting Children and Youth from the National Association of School Psychologists
- Violence in schools: Research findings on the underlying dynamics, response and prevention from The Journalist’s Resource
- IJNet: Tips for reporting on gun violence
- The Dart Center: Lessons Learned from Reporting on Mass Murder
Cat Carroll is a 2024-25 fellow at the Center for Journalism Ethics and a senior at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where she’s majoring in journalism and German and completing a certificate in Middle Eastern Studies.
The Center for Journalism Ethics encourages the highest standards in journalism ethics worldwide. We foster vigorous debate about ethical practices in journalism and provide a resource for producers, consumers and students of journalism.