The shootings and death at Columbine High School in Colorado in the spring of 1999 were in many ways a quintessentially American event. Not only did the events -û in which two high school students invaded their own school armed as if they were army commandos and slaughtered fellow students and teachers -û take place on American ground, but the incident spoke to wide-ranging cultural concerns already present in the United States.
This was not the first school shooting in the United States. Others have followed it since, but it received an almost dizzying amount of notice in the media. Perhaps this is because of the scale of the carnage, perhaps merely because it happened to come at the historical moment when Americans were beginning to be ready to deal with the consequences of their living in such a highly armed society. It could also be because it occurred as the candidates for this yearÆs presidential elections were hammering out their positions, and this is an example of what happens when so many (but not all!) citizens have guns. This was an issue that became woven into the early rhetoric of the campaign û- with progressives lobbying for greater gun control and conservatives arguing for armed teachers.
But beyond the issue of guns in society and the ways in which children can or cannot be protected from the violence that seems to surround each one of us in todayÆs society, another aspect of the way in which the Columbine tragedy was covered was also fundamentally American, and that was the freedom with which both broadcast and print media covered the issue. While this may have gone un-remarked by Americans who are used to such extensive coverage of events even this strikingly violent in nature, the difference in coverage of the events in the United States and abroad can highlight differing cultural attitudes between the United States and other countries.
This paper examines one such set of differences, those between...