The Problem With Naming Tragedies
Discussing national tragedy is never easy. However, following the mass shooting that left fifty people dead at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando on June 12, many media experts are calling the language used to describe such tragedies into question. Specifically, they are taking issue with using the name of a place to describe an event that took place there. For example, saying “What’s changed since Newtown?” instead of “What’s changed since the Newtown shooting,” when referring to the mass shooting that occurred at a Connecticut elementary school in 2012.
Judith Smelser was the managing editor of Colorado Public Radio when the deadly movie theatre shooting took place in Aurora in 2012. She also used to be the news director of WMFE public radio in Orlando. As a resident who lives about two miles from the Pulse nightclub, Smelser is offended and hurt by the use of the word “Orlando” in place of the shooting that took place there. She says, “Call the events the events. So call it the Orlando shooting, don’t call it Orlando.”
Smelser believes this oversimplifying comes from the media, saying “People respond very significantly to what they hear and what they see and how people that they respect in the media refer to things. It becomes part of the national parlance. It becomes part of the national language.”
Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism school, agrees. He says, “in journalism we're in the job of being specific and being clear, so when we have some sort of shorthand that is less than specific and clear it can cause problems.”
Tompkins thinks even the term “Orlando Shooting” is disrespectful. “It's unfair to call it ‘the Orlando shooting’ although it did happen in Orlando. The fact of the matter is that it happened in a nightclub, and that nightclub has a name.”
Nancy Crevier is the editor at The Newtown Bee, the local newspaper in Newtown, Connecticut. She wrote for the paper in 2012 when a gunman killed 20 first graders and 6 educators in Sandy Hook Elementary School. She thinks that the association that Newtown has with mass shootings is particularly unfair. “One of the things that Newtown and Sandy Hook have strived for since the shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 is that it does not define our community,” says Crevier. Instead of saying “Sandy Hook” or “Newtown” to refer to the event, The Newtown Bee instead uses the date, 12/14, to refer to the tragedy.
