Despite intense television news coverage of mass shootings, the vast majority of segments about the Las Vegas attack included no discussion of gun policy or other solutions to America’s gun violence crisis, according to a new report from a liberal media criticism group.

An analysis of evening and Sunday news shows on three major networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, found that major news coverage of the attack on 1 October lasted only a week. And only a handful of segments during the first five days after the shooting included any discussion of gun policy or solutions.

“Conservative media figures will say, ‘Now is not the time to talk about gun policy,’ in the immediate aftermath of the shooting,” said Tim Johnson, who leads the guns and public safety program at Media Matters for America, which conducted the analysis. But reporting on the Las Vegas shooting dropped off so quickly, “the gun debate never really happened,” he said.



After an attack that left 58 people dead and hundreds wounded, with a gunman with dozens of weapons firing down from his hotel room at a crowd of people at an outdoor concert, there was a single day of coverage that included multiple segments that touched on gun policy and other solutions on the networks’ Sunday news shows, Media Matters found. Then the networks’ focus on the shooting dried up almost entirely.

“Basically you had one day of very, very serious policy discussion after the worst shooting in modern US history, and that was it,” Johnson said.

The group used a definition of a segment that included discussion of “gun policy” and solutions. If a TV guest offered a comparison of how many mass shootings there were in the United States compared with other countries, that was counted as a solutions discussion, even if the guest did not explicitly say the United States should imitate other countries. A vague statement that “gun culture has to change in the US, without necessarily articulating what does that mean,” also counted as a solutions or gun policy discussion.

“To be fair to the networks, we wanted to be pretty broad in that category,” Johnson said. “Even so, we got relatively few hits.”

The Media Matters analysis of Las Vegas coverage did not include news segments on CNN, Fox News, or other channels. Media Matters is known for its frequent criticism of Fox News and other rightwing outlets.

The Guardian launched a new series, Break the Cycle, this week that aims to change the way news outlets cover America’s gun crisis by putting more emphasis on solutions, not just political stalemate in Washington. The series has already highlighted victories in advancing 10 different solutions to different aspects of America’s gun violence epidemic. Many of the strategies highlighted have been rigorously studied and found to save lives.