Caren Teves and her husband Tom were on vacation in Maui in 2012 when they received a frantic phone call from Amanda Lindgren, their son Alex’s girlfriend. Amanda and Alex had been at a movie. There had been a shooting. She didn’t know what had happened to him.
For the next twelve hours, the family desperately tried to locate Alex. In between frantic phone calls to the police and different local hospitals, they watched the sensationalistic TV news coverage about the mass shooter who attacked a midnight viewing of The Dark Knight Rises in Colorado. Photos of the perpetrator, with his garishly dyed red hair, kept appearing on the screen.
Lindgren would later describe how she had kept standing up in shock as the shooting began, and how Alex had pulled her down and covered her body with his own. He had been killed trying to shield her.
In the days after they learned Alex had been killed, Tom Teves challenged news anchors to report on his son’s heroism, and the bravery of other survivors and first responders, instead of trying to delve into the mind of the shooter.
It was an uphill battle. Some TV segments simply cancelled their interviews with the Teves family over their request that the perpetrator’s photograph not be displayed during an interview with them. “I wish I had not done that,” Caren Teves says, believing now that their principled stance only served to silence them. “I would have still been able to talk about Alex and call them out, whether the picture was up or not.”
Since 2012, the family has launched a campaign to prevent media coverage from playing into the perpetrators’ craving for fame by spreading the shooters’ photographs, focusing on body counts and ranking different shootings against each other.
Over the past few years, the No Notoriety campaign has seen bipartisan progress, with endorsements from law enforcement groups and victims’ families, and some journalists pledging to abide by the principles of trying to use shooters’ names and images sparingly. Law enforcement officials in Sutherland Springs, Texas, last week announced they would follow a similar approach. “If you notice I use ‘shooter’ instead of the suspect’s name, we do not want to glorify him and what he’s done,” Freeman Martin, a spokesman for the Texas department of public safety, said last week.
But many media outlets still resist the “No Notoriety” principles, which Erik Wemple of the Washington Post has called “a public service, not some nefarious ‘glorification’ quest”.
Teves is scathing about the media’s refusal to change how they cover shootings. “Their argument boils down to: you’re not going to tell us what to do,” she says. “It’s a money-maker for them. Sensationalism sells.”
Today, she worries that the sheer horror of mass shootings is a barrier to Americans endorsing political change. “A lot of people don’t want to grasp it, because it’s that awful.” But if, after mass shootings 20 years ago, “we all stood up and said, ‘enough is enough,’ Alex would still be alive. He’d still be here.”
