After the latest shooting at a U.S. military base, a pair of Fox News personalities, Megyn Kelly and Sean Hannity, have vowed not to use the names of killers who perpetrate mass shootings in order to quash fame seeking.
As the incident was ongoing on April 2, Fox’s Kelly announced that she would not be saying the killer’s name on the air.
“Authorities are identifying the shooter. If you are interested you can get his name on other shows, like the one that preceded this one, and online, but we have decided not to name these mass killers here as a policy here on the Kelly File. Too often it is infamy they seek, and we decline to help,” Kelly said early in her show.
Sean Hannity, who followed Kelly’s broadcast, made a similar decision to eschew naming the Fort Hood killer.
This isn’t the first time that Kelly has refused to utter the name of a mass murderer.
Last year Kelly told Bill O’Reilly that she was going to put an end to giving mass shooters their publicity.
“I really think I’m at the point where I no longer want to utter the names of these people at all. I think we should all do it. If they want to find out the names of these people who do this, who shoot up places or take themselves out in a blaze of glory, go look it up online,” Kelly said in October.
Kelly and Hannity aren’t the only ones calling for journalists to block the fame that mass killers seek. Steve Buttry of the Journal Register Co. has also called for an end to giving mass killers the notoriety they desire. In another case, the New Statesman criticized the national media for how it handled the mass killing in a Colorado movie theater in 2012 because it seemed to aggrandize the killer.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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