Brooke Baldwin Calls Out Media Coverage of Mass Shootings, Recalls Stunning Moment CNN Pulled Away From Parkland to Cover Trump

Former CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin predicted news networks will soon move on from Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman recently entered an elementary school and took the lives of more than 20.

In a Tuesday piece for The Atlantic, Baldwin recalled being taken off of coverage of past mass shootings in favor of what producers thought was more splashy news. In one instance, she recounted CNN cutting from her coverage in Parkland, Florida after a mass shooting to cover breaking news on then-President Donald Trump.

“My producer assured me that we’d return to coverage in Parkland, but that right then—I’ll never forget it—’we have to break away to go live to Washington.’ But. But. But. Fourteen students were dead. I stood there dumbfounded,” Baldwin wrote in the powerful piece.

She said the shooting in Uvalde was the first such mass shooting she’d heard about through a friend rather than as a reporter herself.

Baldwin listed off the shocking amount of mass shootings she had to cover as a journalist and said the cyclical nature of the media coverage leaves her with a “deep cynicism” looking at Uvalde, a small Texas community that has been flooded with reporters in the wake of the shooting. She predicted the news media will soon move on in favor of stories that garner better ratings:

Let me tell you what will happen: The news media will be in Texas through this weekend, and then news executives will start paring down the coverage next week. The conversation has already turned to politics, as some pundits urge a focus on mental health and others on guns. Some journalists will try to hold our elected representatives’ feet to the fire. A segment or two will go viral. Americans will share their outrage on social media. And then another story will break next week, and the news cycle will move on.

The former CNN reporter offered recommendations for keeping the focus on victims of these mass shootings, including assigning reporters specifically to mass shootings and also displaying the images of victims after they have been shot. The latter recommendation, Baldwin said, comes from the effect she felt in seeing the caskets of Sandy Hook victims.

“I remember standing in silence as I watched one tiny white casket wheeled out of a funeral home when I was covering Sandy Hook in 2012,” she wrote. “I had the thought then: Would minds change about guns in America if we got permission to show what was left of the children before they were placed in the caskets? Would a grieving parent ever agree to do this? I figured this would never happen. But perhaps now is finally the time to ask.”

You can read Baldwin’s full thoughts here.