Danny Hayes believes that the gun control debate after Newtown has persisted (contrary to his expectations) because the media has covered the shooting “in a fundamentally different way than they have others”:
As I wrote in the days after Sandy Hook, coverage of gun control typically spikes following a mass shooting. But it pretty quickly recedes. … Just two weeks after the shooting, gun control looked like it was headed to the dustbin of history again. In particular, the fiscal-cliff debate (and the attendant congressional f-bombs) sucked almost out of the oxygen out of the Washington media air. In the week surrounding the New Year, “fiscal cliff” appeared in the news four times as often as “gun control.” But coverage shortly moved on to a third phase. Whereas gun control had evaporated from the news within about a month of the earlier shootings, in the case of Newtown, it surged back in mid-January.
He also points to the importance of “gun control” in the media’s coverage:
Even before the 27 victims had been laid to rest, gun control was a far more prominent part of the Newtown narrative than it had been in previous incidents. And in contrast to the Virginia Tech, Aurora and Giffords shootings, it has come to dominate the media narrative. The week that Obama issued the executive actions, more than 60 percent of stories that mentioned Newtown also included a reference to gun control.
(Chart: The number of news stories including the phrase “gun control” in the wake of various shootings.)
via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2013/01/-whats-different-about-sandy-hook.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Daily+Dish%29