Newspaper Coverage of the Columbine and Red Lake School Shootings: Collective Memory, School Violence, and "People Like Us".

The 1999 shootings at Columbine High School received saturation coverage by the American media, cycling on a 24-hr news loop and filling newspapers at the local and national level. How did newspaper reporting of the 2005 Red Lake Indian Reservation School shootings, the largest school killing since Columbine, compare with the press' representations of Columbine? In this article we perform a qualitative content analysis of three newspapers (The New York Times as the national paper of record, and local papers in the communities in which the events occurred) over a two-week period following each event. We found that the reporting of Columbine and Red Lake differed not only in terms of quantity, but also content and form. Columbine was immediately marked with social significance and became a national story while Red Lake received significantly less coverage and was mostly a local story. Red Lake reporting was explicitly raced and classed while the prominent role of race and gender in the Columbine killings was largely ignored by local and national media. Further, the press covered similar themes in their reporting but employed different narrative elements and de-politicized Red Lake. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]