GREG GUTFELD: The media incentivizes future mass shootings by rewarding the present ones

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Gutfeld: It's time to 'shut down' coverage of school shootings

'Gutfeld!' co-hosts weigh in on the media's coverage of the Nashville school shooting and how the media incentivizes future mass shootings.

GREG GUTFELD: Happy Wednesday, everyone. So before we get to the fun stuff, I do want to talk about the Nashville school shooting. Don't worry, the second half of the show is really funny. Brian Kilmeade will be here to talk politics. 

So, last night I came across an interview with former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole, and she backs up something that I've been ranting about every time bad stuff like this happens. She told The Daily Mail that Nashville and pretty much everywhere else should brace for copycat events due to the inevitable contagion effect caused by the media, adding, "...threats increase in schools nationwide after a shooting has occurred anywhere in the U.S." Sadly, evil seems to inspire more evil. It's the same reason they keep making more Sex in the City movies, but the media helps. Now she knows this to be true, because after the Columbine shootings in '99, the FBI studied 18 previous school shootings and found that the copycat influence was real in all of them. Turns out mass shooters are as unoriginal as they are disgusting and why?

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A mourner visits a memorial outside of The Covenant School for the six victims who were killed in a mass shooting in Nashville, Tennessee. (KR/Mega for Fox News Digital)

Because info on these fiends becomes instantly available in minute detail. And what do fiends share a love for? Infamy. It's why they keep press clippings from previous shooters and also why they boast about the infamy before it actually happens, like the Nashville shooter did. So the media incentivizes future mass shootings by rewarding the present ones. I don't know how you can get any more plain than that. 

Which brings me to Nashville's coverage. I hate it. Here's the front page of the New York Post yesterday, the "timeline of terror" shows you minute by minute how the carnage unfolded, complete with pictures of the gunman looking like a gunman. Then you get chilling final text messages from the shooter. You get photos of the victims. You get stories about the shooter's parents. Is that enough? Well, we also got the body cam footage. Family members of victims. Photos of the classroom pre-rampage, did we need that? And this is just one paper, multiply that by thousands because it's not just the Post. And hell, I love the Post. They broke the story on Hunter's laptop, and it's the most accurate source for what Kim Kardashian's butt is up to. 

But this story's everywhere, USA Today, Newsweek, ABC News, CBS, CNN, NBC, they all featured similar takes on their home pages. So it gets amplified online as well as the networks, and social media blasts it into every single phone. It's like Jimmy Failla at Fox News. He's everywhere and I'd like to apologize for that. 

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So how long before there's another shooting? And where is the media's responsibility in this? Don't they know the science is there? The FBI has been saying this for 25-years. The repetition of minimal facts, along with the play by play reporting and visual accompaniment, amplifies the story which informs the deeds of future ----. In fact, it can lead, in all probability, to another shooting within weeks. So the only way you can stop this is to show some responsibility in the reporting. Right now, the media functions like a mindless meter maid, and that's no offense to meter maids. After all, they did look the other way when I keyed, Jesse Watters' Ferrari. 

A police officer walks by an entrance to The Covenant School after a shooting in Nashville, Tennessee. (AP Photo/John Amis)

But in a way, reporters are often just writing tickets, doing the job necessary right then and right there with little or no moral responsibility for the future. And it's the same media who, after turning every shooting into a spectacle of infamy, then complains, why does this always happen? Well, because evil exists, and you amplify it, you dumb ass. You think that repetition of the same old facts doesn't matter. Why do you think we have advertisers? You think we ran the same old friggin Snuggie ad every 5 minutes because it didn't work? Hell, thanks to advertising, I own 400 Chia Pets. My suggestion, adopt what the World Health Organization advises regarding suicides: Create guidelines to reduce the media footprint, to reduce imitation. Shut down the visuals and have all new info done by press release. No video, no film, no pics and avoid prominent placement. Stop repeating the same facts. Move on when you run out. It seems you need to make it as boring as a book on tape. Like this one. 

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Now you could cut these incidents in half or more if the media had agreed to do it, but will they? I keep pleading, but I fear there's just too much attention and power to gain the media lives by the ratings while everyone else dies by them.