Hi kids! It’s me, J.Williamez, with another installment of your favourite weekly column written by a douche with a mullet and a handlebar moustache!

This week I’d like to talk about something that I think we can all agree is evil – even you pesky nihilists who sit around all day drinking strawberry daiquiris and not caring about stuff. The thing I’m talking about is mass murder. Mass murderers seem to garner a special spot in our media and I’d like see this come to an end.

For some reason, they fascinate us so much that the news media make millions of dollars every time there is a school shooting or someone cuts their family into little pieces before sautéing them in butter and mushrooms. I guess this is just a logical extension of our love of trainwrecks (both literal and figurative) which explains the old journalistic axiom: If it bleeds, it leads.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong for us to love carnage. I’d certainly be the first to admit that I’m a huge fan of giving dead bodies the old “poke-it-with-a-stick” treatment when I find them in the woods. I do think, however, that the media could act a little more responsibly when it comes to their coverage of mass murders.

I remember when the Columbine High School shooting happened a few years back, every newspaper, television station and website was dedicated almost exclusively to telling the story.

In and of itself, this is not surprising. It was pretty big news and that’s what newspapers and programs are supposed to be filled with, right? Gordon Sinclair Jr. and I being the obvious exceptions, of course – I write mostly about poop and unicorns and he writes mostly about puppies and sunshine.

However, what I object to is that the media almost unfailingly gives more coverage to the lives and minds of the murderers than to the victims of these horrible crimes. For weeks on end, the media run over their family history, blog entries and interviews with their neighbours. And then they have the collective balls to pass judgment when another messed up angry kid who has no friends and gets no attention goes off and kills a bunch of people.

What the hell do they expect? Of course people are going to keep mass murdering if part of their “punishment” is exactly the attention they wanted in the first place!

My solution is this: Instead of doing in-depth profiles on these murderers, newspapers should doctor up some family photos to show them having “relations” with their grandparents or something along those lines. I think it’s a safe bet that no one who ever said “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” has ever had a photo of themselves being double-teamed by their grandparents on the front page of every newspaper in North America.

An approach like this should be enough to nip the problem in the grandpa’s butt.

J. Williamez is a local musician who has no use for objective media. Catch him live at Shannon’s Irish Pub every Wednesday night.

Published in Volume 64, Number 5 of The Uniter (October 1, 2009)