Lessons from Columbine About School Shootings and Media Misinformation
On April 20th, 1999, two students at Columbine High School murdered twelve students and a teacher and sent the nation scrambling for answers.
As Dave Cullen detailed in his book, Columbine, initial news coverage quickly portrayed the perpetrators as two alienated students, obsessed with carrying out a revenge fantasy against bullies. Those early media profiles have since proved incomplete, but they continue to shape the way we understand school shootings today.
More than a decade after Columbine, we’re still struggling to figure out not only what causes school shootings, but whether or not we’re seeing more of them. Former student John Savage says, “I think it’s important to kind of keep in mind that there are a lot of schools all over the world, where no one has ever been shot.”
More Like This

How a 1944 Supreme Court Ruling on Internment Camps Led to a Reckoning
The U.S. government ordered 120,000 people of Japanese descent, most American citizens, imprisoned during World War II. An admission of wrongdoing and reparations payments came decades later, but a Supreme Court ruling had lasting impact.

Extremism in America: Out of the Shadows
According to experts who monitor the radical right, the white supremacist ideology that police say drove the Buffalo gunman has begun moving from the extremes into the mainstream. This is the fifth episode of a five-part series produced in collaboration with The WNET Group’s reporting initiative Exploring Hate.

Extremism in America: A Surge in Violence
Violent attacks involving extremist ideology, like the Buffalo rampage, began to rise in the last decade, but officials were slow to recognize homegrown threats. This is the fourth episode of a five-part series produced in collaboration with The WNET Group’s reporting initiative Exploring Hate.

Extremism in America: Missed Warnings
In the years before Barack Obama was elected, many groups on the extreme right kept a relatively low profile. With the election of a Black president, that changed. This is the third episode of a five-part series produced in collaboration with The WNET Group’s reporting initiative Exploring Hate.