A Mutual Admiration Society

Serial killers become famous over night. The media gives them nick names and everybody becomes obsessed about the cases. The media makes real life horror stories into cinematic dramas most of the time. Our society feed off of bad news and cases like these. Morgan Summerfield, the author of the article  "Serial Killer vs Media: A Symbiotic Relationship?", brings up a great point while studying the relationship between media and serial killers. She says that media emphasize and create the stories about serial killers to compete with other media networks. Not only do the killers sometimes gain sympathy from the public, they become obsessed about how they are portrayed. Some killers who suffer from grandeur delusion or any other narcissistic personality disorder are almost encouraged by the time spend talking about them. this can become extremely dangerous and provoke killing sprees. Humans are curious by nature and get engrossed by the phenomena that is created. Not only the stories, but the emphasis of murder, horrific stories and extreme killers have become a complete fascination in our society. Numerous television shows and movies have created an ideal image of crime solving. Kids and teenagers have become fascinated and more and more and starting to want to pursue careers in this domain. The only problem is, media has glorified it. So much is not shown.  Summerfield concludes her analysis by saying that the relationship between serial killers is very close knit. She even calls the relationship "mutual admiration society" which is very accurate. Who knows, maybe if cases were not made public, we would have less crimes by copycat killers. We might even prevent some killers to take action. If serial killers knew nobody was watching and they were not getting any attention for their actions, would they still commit the crime? It would  be interesting to find out.
To read Summerfileds full article visit: http://voices.yahoo.com/serial-killer-vs-media-symbiotic-relationship-12879.html

written by Courtney Milonja