Listen to Episode 12 here

SHERRY HAMBY, PHD. 

Sherry Hamby, Ph.D. is Director of the Life Paths Appalachian Research Center (LPARC) and Research Professor of Psychology at the University of the South. She is also founding editor of the APA journal Psychology of Violence. A licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Hamby has worked for more than 20 years on the problem of violence, including crisis intervention, therapy, involvement in grassroots organizations, and research leading to the publication of more than 150 articles and books.  Dr. Hamby holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Dr. Hamby’s most recent work focuses on the “ordinary magic” of resilience that is attainable even after significant adversity.  

MARGARET SCHWARTZ, PHD. 

Margaret Schwartz is associate professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University. Her book Dead Matter: The Meaning of Iconic Corpses is available from the University of Minnesota Press. 

MUSIC ATTRIBUTIONS

transcript

OPENING SEQUENCE

D.S. MOSS

As you probably can tell, that's the sound of me reading a book in my underwear while swinging in a hammock deep in the Amazon rainforest. 

I was there for an ayahuasca spirit journey attempting to kill my ego and, of course, I recorded it all. So stay tuned for my psychedelic experience in the next episode and season finale: Death of Ego. 

But back to this episode, the reason you're listening to me read while swinging in a hammock is because it's also the sound of my complete internet detachment.

For two weeks I lived without hot water, mirrors, electricity, phone, laptop, and most importantly a connection to the outside world.

I was completely oblivious to what was happening outside the rainforest canopy - and once I got over the impulsive email checking withdrawals - my God, was it sweet.    

But, as Grandpa always says..."you can't make a living by doing psychedelics in your underwear" and so...back to reality I went and reconnected.  

D.S. MOSS

And just like that, I was back in the media fuzz. This time around, however, I could see through the fuzz a bit more clearly and was surprised by how much of it -particularly the news - was of violence and death.   

SHERRY

Violence has been a focus of media such as it existed, really, from our earliest written records.

D.S. MOSS

That's Dr. Sherry Hamby.

SHERRY

I am a clinical psychologist by training, and I am the editor of the American Psychological Association Journal, Psychology of Violence, and director of the Appalachian Research Center and a research professor of psychology at the University of the South.

D.S. MOSS

Sherry is right. Death and depictions of death have been at the core of entertainment and media from primitive cave paintings to Greek tragedies to bullfighting, video games and films. 

And as much as we'd like to forget, even up into the 19th century, the torture and execution of prisoners was a popular public affair. 

D.S. MOSS

So, no...modern society has not gained a new appetite for death in their media and entertainment. We have always been this way. 

SHERRY

I don't think there's any question either that the pervasiveness of aggressive material and violent material has really changed dramatically....

D.S. MOSS

From the moment we wake up, a flood of content washes over us. The amount of content produced and distributed on a daily basis is mind blowing - upwards of 2.5 exabytes. That's 2.5 billion gigs, all of which is competing for our attention.    

There's so much data that for this episode I have to focus on one type of media: the news. 

MUSIC: "Dances and dames" By kevin MacLeod

D.S. MOSS

In this episode I talk with a journalist couple, a psychologist, a professor of media studies and a poet to answer... 

Are humans becoming more violent?

Why are we increasingly seeing more images of death?

What effect does seeing death in the news have on our behavior?   

And..

Is it my responsibility as a global citizen to bear witness to images of death across the world even if it's at the expense of my own happiness?  

That's right, it's about to get deep in here. Please join me for episode 12 of The Adventures of Memento Mori: Deadly News.

OPENING BUMPER

MUSIC:  "Memento mori" by Mikey ballou

Female announcer

From The Jones Story Company, this is: THE ADVENTURES OF MEMENTO MORI, A Cynic's Guide for Learning to Live by Remembering to Die - the podcast that explores mortality. Here's your host D.S. Moss.

CHAPTER 1: MOST PEACEFUL DECADE

MUSIC: "News at 11" by Glass boy

D.S. MOSS

News headlines have always been sensationalist. If it bleeds it leads. But now it seems like it's getting worse - plane crashes, terrorist attacks, zika, school shootings, police shootings. Everyday there's a new threat, more and more people dying. 

So my first question is: 

Is so much death in the news a sign that human beings are becoming more violent? 

Well, it didn't take long to find the statistics to answer that question...

but before I share it...what would you guess? 

RUTHIE

True or False: Human beings live in the most violent decade of recorded human history?

Person 2

False.

Person 4

I'd say false...

Person 1

I hate these kinds of things. False... 

PERSON 5

Unfortunately, true. 

Person 3

I would say false... 

D.S. MOSS

The answer is: FALSE

Not only do we not live in the most violent decade, by almost every objective measure, we live in the safest, healthiest, and most peaceful era in human existence.

I've listed the sources and annotations on the episode home page.

Yep. Historically, humanity has been considerably more volatile and violent.

The world is still dangerous, of course, and by no means should we be popping corks for a job well done, but... 

...Because of the 24 hour news cycle, unlimited distribution channels, journalistic hyperbole, a 10 fold increase in professional photographers and filmmakers, and a world population armed with camera phones we are constantly witnessing the graphic images of the worst that humanity has to offer. 

CHAPTER 2: THE NEW NEWS

MICAH

We are inundated with images of death, everywhere. At least in the non mainstream media work, in the social media world we are.

Mainstream media does not want to show images of dead bodies.

Your Twitter feed, the other day a beheading video just popped up in my Twitter feed.

D.S. MOSS

I invited photojournalist and documentarian duo Micah Garen and Marie Helene Carlton to talk about their experience as reporters of the news. 

MARIE HELENE

Before, everything went through this narrow funnel of the mainstream media where editors would be, in a way the collective conscience and make decisions based on, we're publishing this because it serves a greater journalistic purpose.... Now, with this plethora of images, the onus is on the viewer to try to understand what the image means and what the context is, what the intention of putting out the image was.

D.S. MOSS

Marie Helene goes on to say that not only are seeing a lot more images of death, they're becoming harder to understand because they're coming from a variety of sources - each trying to influence us to feel a particular way about them. 

MARIE HELENE

There's governments, there's militant groups, terrorist organizations, individuals, activist groups, citizen journalists. ....What am I to make of this image?

D.S. MOSS

And that's a challenge, right? So not only are they competing for my attention, now they're also competing for my interpretation.

A recent example of this is the assassination of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov.  

I was mesmerized by photos of his corpse lying there on the ground with his killer standing above it - in a well fitted suit, in an art gallery, and the corpse was lying there so perfectly dead. I was mesmerized by the scene, but I didn't know what to feel. I wasn't sad, I wasn't glad, I didn't instinctively know who should be the good guy and who should be the bad guy. 

MUSIC: "i knew a guy" by kevin macleod

D.S. MOSS

So let's talk about that - the corpse as a vessel for messages in the media.   

CHAPTER 3: THE CORPSE

Margaret

So the corpse is a non-hierarchical assemblage of heterogeneous elements. Many, many elements...

D.S. MOSS

Welcome Margaret Schwartz, associate professor at Fordham University in the department of communication media studies. 

MARGARET

It both is and is not the person that it refers to. It's a referential object. It's a media object. It points to. It comes between the memory of the person and the person in life... It's made up of many elements that are both material and representational, shall we say. Or textual. It's an in between, a mediation object and it's a liminal object. It stands on the edge of things because a corpse doesn't refer back to the person that it was for very long...

D.S. MOSS

And you thought a corpse was just a dead body.

MARGARET

What I teach is media theory and feminist media theory and media and embodiment.

...but my research interest is specifically on the connection between objects in the world, specifically bodies, and then the media that represent them.

D.S. Moss_Mono

Dead bodies.

MARGARET

Dead bodies and also living bodies, ... If you want to go deep in my catalog, I got a piece on Britney Spears' vagina, so I'm interested in how random body parts are ...

D.S. MOSS_MONO

That wasn't a pun, was it?

MARGARET

... Interact in the media. It was not a pun.

D.S. MOSS

Margaret is the author of "Dead Matter: The Meaning of Iconic Corpses" and as she just explained - the corpse is more than a dead body it is a representational storytelling object. 

MARGARET

It's a really excellent example of how the physical can come to be metaphorical. 

D.S. MOSS_MONO

You break it down in your book, in regards to the media, 3 types of corpses. The nation, tabloid, and the martyr. Can you just go over just a quick summation of those 3?

MARGARET

Yeah, each of those are like corporeal metaphors in a way. The body since the Renaissance is a metaphor for the nation.

...The king is the head and the people are the body. You have corpses that come to stand in for a nation or a group of people. Those are nation bodies.

D.S. MOSS

Examples she talks about in her book are Lenin and Eva Peron. In each case, these dead leaders and their corpses come to represent something the nation is about.

MARGARET

Next is the martyred body...They are bodies that stand in for groups of people that consider themselves dispossessed or oppressed in some way. The death of that person becomes symbolic of the suffering of the entire group of people.

D.S. MOSS

Not only does a martyr become a symbol of a cause they also become a rallying point for others. 

In the book she talks about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for flirting with a white girl and who - through the image of his mutilated corpse - became a symbol of the civil rights movement.

MARGARET

The third is tabloid bodies which I had to fight with my publisher about to get that in there... because what's interesting about tabloid bodies is that if the martyred body is someone who becomes famous only in death, right? The tabloid body is a body that we have obsessively known all throughout life and which dies unexpectedly, right? Again, the two figures that are emblematic of this that I cover in the book are Diana of Wales and Michael Jackson.

MUSIC: "waking up the drive" BY glass boy

D.S. MOSS

Those are the 3 types of corpses Margaret talks about in her book: The nation, the martyr and the tabloid. All of them are metaphors for embodiment in the media in various ways. 

But it's the martyred body that we see most frequently in the news and when we return we're going to be talking about the recently martyred Hamza Ali Al-Khateeb, Aylan Kurdi and Laquan McDonald.    

CALL TO ACTION 1

MUSIC: Emergency exit by Dr. frankenstein 

FEMALE ANNOUNCER

Ever wonder what Elvis's last words were or the most outrageous methods of living forever? Discover titillating titbits about mortality by visiting "The Adventures of Memento Mori" YouTube channel and be the slightly odd yet endlessly fascinating conversationalist at your next party.

And be sure to stay up to date with the quest for enlightenment on Instagram and Twitter by following @remembertodie.

All of this, and more, can be found on our site remembertodie.com. And now, back to show...

CHAPTER 4:  HAMZA ALI AL-KHATEEB

MUSIC: "Backed vibes clean" by kevin macleod

D.S. MOSS

Ok. A recap. So far, I've found the answers to:

Are humans becoming more violent?, and

Why are we seeing more images of death in news-type media?

No, we are not becoming more violent. In fact, we live in the most peaceful era in human history. And, we are seeing more death because our new ability to record and distribute images makes it possible to witness the death that has always existed. Now there are just fewer places for it to hide. 

We left the conversation with how corpses are used in the media as symbols to deliver a bigger message.

MARGARET

When they returned his body, they said, "Well, we're going to give him back to you, but you have to promise, you have to sign a paper that says you're not going to publicize this in any way."

D.S. MOSS

Back with media professor Dr. Margaret Schwartz talking about the martyred body of Hamza Ali Al-Khateeb, a 13 year old Syrian boy who was tortured, castrated and murdered for protesting the Syrian regime. 

MARGARET

Well, they allowed an activist to videotape the body and to show that ... it was obvious that the body had been tortured. 

He becomes then a figure for the Syrian resistance or for the oppressed Syrian people...

D.S. MOSS

And back with documentarians Marie Helen Carleton and Micah Garen. 

MARIE HELENE

In this case, he becomes an icon, but in both ways, the regime hopes that bodies that have died in this way, torture, will deter people from going into the streets to protest, but yet for many, many others, it acts as a catalyst for protest. He becomes a symbol far beyond his actual death.

MICAH

Yeah, his corpse was used in both ways by the regime and against the regime.

D.S. MOSS

In talking about corpses martyred in the media, the sad truth is there are a lot to choose from. With that in mind, there are three reasons why I chose to talk about Hamza Ali Al-Khateeb.

First, because it is well known yet not shown in mainstream media. 

Second, to acknowledge that his parents made the decision to have his body recorded to show the world and lastly to illustrate that images of death in the media can have multiple messages, often competing.    

MARIE HELENE

But the brutality that he endured that we also witness through looking at his mutilated corpse, if that doesn't act as a call to action, then what is it?...We are horrified, but does that turn into then, a question of foreign policy, or America's role in the world? What should be done with Assad, or is it so horrific and our capacity to understand death and the brutality of this death, are we unable to process it so we turn away and it becomes just another horror of war.

CHAPTER 5: AYLAN KURDI

D.S. MOSS

Marie Helen's point takes us to one of the most iconic images of the last couple years which is the body of Aylan Kurdi, the three year old Turkish boy, whose dead body washed up on shore after he'd drowned trying to make the crossing from Turkey to Greece....

MICAH

Yeah, it's interesting, because his death, surprisingly to me even, became a big media story. When we were out in Greece working, one of the German rescue boat drivers had left his high paying job taking people around on a yacht, to work as a rescue boat driver, because of that image of Aylan Kurdi. I was surprised that that image became so popular, because there are so many images of death out there, so why this one? When you look at it, I think there are two reasons...

D.S. MOSS

One is that after circulating on social media that image made it into mainstream media. 

MICAH

The other is, when you look at the image itself, it sort of fits the classical metaphor of how people want to see that. It's a child looking almost cherubic, lying down peacefully, almost sleeping. You think of a dead child, the child's an angel.

MARIE HELENE

That little boy did change the way people talked and reported who these people were making this dangerous crossing. That there are people fleeing war and devastation and that these are the risks that people are willing to take because, in fact, they are refugees, because where they're coming from is so horrible that they need to go to safety.

MICAH

What's interesting is a lot of what you heard from people, what they said when they saw that picture, they said, I could see that being my child.

CHAPTER 6: LAQUAN MCDONALD

D.S. MOSS

Now, In contrast to the peaceful image of a child seemingly sleeping on the beach - there is the bystander, dashcam or body camera videos of police shooting primarily African American men. 

D.S. MOSS_MONO

I want to talk more about the martyred body. Specifically, in relation to access to media. Meaning people's access to media where ... Emmett Till's mother, for example, made a choice. This day and age, most parents, when a body is martyred, don't get to make that choice.

MARGARET

Absolutely. No, I'm really glad you brought that up because it's something that I think about a lot.

Laquon McDonald, who's the boy who was shot in Chicago and they had that videotape...

...I remember watching the news or seeing the news. They aired it. The same clip of him just being dropped like a stray dog or something. Over and over. I think it was 6 or 7 times. Just over and over again.

You got to think, yeah. Maybe Till, she decided she was going to deliberately sacrifice her own privacy for a political cause. That is a brave and laudable choice, but it is not a choice that many of the parents of these kids are making. These people who are dying. Who are being killed. To me it really indexes, again, the inequality and the injustice. Right? This is one more thing that's being taken away from these families. I think it's also a way in which we can see the treatment of the dead really indexes treatment of the living. 

D.S. MOSS

This is where I become extremely conflicted. According to the Washington Post, citizens killed by police are actually down from 2015. Slightly. HOWEVER, there is a 63% increase of the killings being caught on video.

This is a question that has me ethically confused - Are the airing of these killings necessary in order to show injustice is being done?

MARGARET

I think the moment we're living through is this cognitive dissonance where it's like, "Okay, we saw this guy being killed. We saw these police officers shooting Laquon McDonald." It doesn't seem to matter. It doesn't seem to make a difference in the outcome from a juridical standpoint. Yet that impulse is still there. That the image must be shown in order to let people know that injustice is going on.

D.S. MOSS

Which leads to my next question - in a broader sense - if we are continually inundated with seeing death in the news do we become desensitized to it? 

CHAPTER 7: DESENSITIZE

SHERRY

I'm not sure if we really become desensitized to it... I think it does change us.

D.S. MOSS

Back with psychologist Sherry Hamby.

SHERRY

I think one of the results of all of this media exposure is not that we become used to it or that we become insensitive to it, but that we just know more about it than is really probably good for us in the grand scheme of things...

There was a study that was done quite some years ago, and we don't do enough studies like it, where people who had been exposed to violence had these much more complex cognitive networks for terms of violence...

In this study, the people who had the most nuanced understanding of different terms of violence and being able to distinguish among different types of violence actually had lower well-being on some measures than people who had more simplistic categories and who tend to just lump all of that stuff into this big, bad mush that they didn't really want to sort through any more carefully than that. In some ways, I think, really, that we'd just be better off if we didn't know as much about it as we did.

D.S. MOSS

So the study confirms that in regards to death and violence a certain degree of ignorance is bliss. I will have a higher personal well being unplugged and in a hammock - on some measures.  

Is watching the news worth the trade off?

MUSIC: "Dances and Dames" By Kevin macleod

D.S. MOSS

You know earlier, when I said that we live in the most peaceful era in history? There is actually an exception and it's specific to the United States. 

I'll give you one guess - it has to do with guns. More after this.  

CALL TO ACTION 2

MUSIC: "O Cerebro do Morto" by Dr. Frankenstein 

FEMALE ANNOUNCER

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CHAPTER 8: CONTAGION EFFECT

MUSIC: "gorilla" by glass boy

D.S. MOSS

The act of death and violence that is on the rise in the United States is mass shootings.

Studies have shown that there is a direct link between national media coverage and the frequency of these tragedies.

It's called the contagion effect. In this context, contagion effect is a type of social influence. It refers to the propensity for certain behavior exhibited by one person to be copied by others who are either in the vicinity of the original actor, or who have been exposed to media coverage describing the behavior of the original actor.

D.S. MOSS_MONO

Now, it seems like, just as someone who watches the news, that there's just a lot of copycats. We can say Columbine was the benchmark, I guess, and then, now, it's people that are on the edge seeing that, in a way, they're becoming celebrities. It seems like it happens just more and more and more frequently.

SHERRY

Yes. Most people think that there's some sort of contagion process going on, and it's not just true with mass shootings. There are other types of violence that have contagion sort of effects. For example, suicides also commonly occur in clusters, and one suicide can trigger a lot of other ones in the same community in a fairly short period of time...

...One of the few forms of violence that, in fact, is increasing is the one you just mentioned. It's mass shootings, and that is the type of violence that kids practice over and over and over again in video games.

D.S. MOSS

There's no evidence and nobody seriously thinks that video games alone are going to take somebody who, otherwise, is an incredibly well-regulated person, and then turn that person into some kind of criminal. It is one of those straws on the camel's back. 

SHERRY

If you are somebody who is vulnerable to those impulses and pressures to behave in aggressive actions, then, yes, a lot of exposure to violent video games will almost certainly help make it more likely that you're going to do that.

D.S. MOSS

A key motivator with mass shooters is that they know they will become famous for doing it.

SHERRY

That's an old problem. There are lots of criminals that have been, in some sense, romanticized from years past, Bonnie and Clyde, Jesse James. It's not a new problem to these mass shooters, but I definitely think that it contributes to that and the appeal that they are able to earn and the admiration on the part of some is one of the reasons that they are contagious. If nobody knew about them, then how would there be some sort of trigger for a contagion effect?

Max

My name is Max Stossel. I'm a storyteller and poet.

CHAPTER 9: STOP MAKING MURDERERS FAMOUS

D.S. MOSS

I came across Max's short film "Stop Making Murderers Famous" and although it's meant to be viewed on your phone, I'm going to play you the audio.

MUSIC: "Stop Making Murderers famous?"

D.S. MOSS_MONO

What was the genesis of "Stop Making Murderers Famous"?

MAX

After the shooting in Oregon, I watched the clip that I actually used in the video... I cut off the end, because CNN went on to quote the shooter in saying some pretty horrifying things, but I watched them say, "I will not name the shooter. I will not give him the credit that he probably sought prior to this horrific and cowardly act," and then I watched the CNN journalist literally cut directly away from that and say, "Actually, no, we do have his name. We are reporting it. Here's his name. Here's how he's listed online. Here's the things that he said. Here's messages out the world," and just a disconnect between national media and the people on the ground.

D.S. MOSS

This bothered Max so much that he committed himself to making a difference.

MAX

This seemed to me like something that was so simple that if we could just change the way we tell the stories of these events, we can actually stop some future ones, so I wanted to spearhead a campaign around that.

D.S. MOSS_MONO

What's been some of the results of "Stop Making Murderers Famous"?

MAX

The goal of this for me was always to establish policies with media organizations on how to tell these stories in the future...

There are five media organizations that have now established policies on how they'll name shooters in the future. The basis of those policies is that they will limit the name and likeness of the perpetrator in reporting, except when they're at large and in doing so would aid in the perpetrator's capture.

D.S. MOSS

The name and likeness of the killer are to be excluded from the headline and thumbnail image.

MAX

The thinking behind that especially on social, that's the thing that's being passed around the internet, and often involuntarily, you can be looking at your friend's dog photos, and then all of a sudden, bam, you're hit with this guy who just killed 15 people.

D.S. MOSS

Omitting the name entirely isn't realistic in journalism because it's part of the story, but the aim is to limit the name and likeness from the body of the content to make it less prominent and then on the flip side - to elevate the names and likenesses of all victims to send the cultural message that their lives are more important than the killer.

MAX

That's the first bullet of the policy established by these organizations. The second is to refrain from sharing direct quotes of perpetrator's writings or uploading perpetrator's YouTubes or Facebooks or self-serving photos and void the inclusion of that media and focus on relevant things without spreading the perpetrator's message, avoid linking to an article that violates that policy, and exceptions to A and B there can be made, but only with a really purposeful conversation with the editor.

D.S. MOSS_MONO

You've been brokering in this?

MAX

Yes. Behind the scenes, I went into each of these organizations separately, talking to them, seeing what the pain points were, and working with them. It started as not this policy, and I worked with them to refine it to something that they were comfortable with, and then we got together as a digital round table with everybody in the room and talked about what was something that we could align on, and now it's a matter of getting through the corporate bureaucracy of actually making an announcement happen.

D.S. MOSS_MONO

When you approached these media organizations, were they receptive to you in a positive way?

MAX

It's really funny. At the beginning, "Hi, I'm a poet. I'd love to tell you how to run your media organization."...

...Once they had watched the video, I was often able to get into the door. The concept was almost comical of, "I wrote this poem, and I want you guys to change the way you're doing your million dollar business."

D.S. MOSS_MONO

I love that poets are making change.

MAX

Me too.

MUSIC: "As I figure" BY kevin macleod

CHAPTER 10: CONCLUSION

D.S. MOSS

British novelist Thomas Hardy once wrote- "If a way to the better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the worst."

So, for me, I will put some pants on, get out of the hammock and be a witness to the worst of the news. Even if I'm helpless to do anything about it - the recognition of is important.  

The difference now is that I understand it's not a passive relationship. It's a challenge and the onus is on me to select and interpret the firehose of information.    

And we should occasionally recognize that sometimes good things happen too. 

MUSIC: "3 in Raw" by jazzafari

OUTRO

D.S. MOSS

Thanks for joining me on another episode of The Adventures of Memento Mori.... 

Thanks to Micah Garen and Marie Helene Carlton, Dr. Margaret Schwartz and Dr. Sherry Hamby, and Max Stossel from Stop Making Murderers Famous. 

Please check out all of their great work at www.remembertodie.com.   

I am D.S. Moss. Back again in two weeks for more the season finale of...The Adventures of Memento Mori.

CLOSING BUMPER

MUSIC: End with our theme music

FEMALE ANNOUNCER

The episode was produced by Josh Heilbronner and D.S. Moss Theme music composed by Mikey Ballou. This has been a production of The Jones Story Company. Until the next time... remember to die.