We need his name, if only to understand

For someone hellbent on rescuing Canada’s legacy media outlets, ostensibly in the name of brave and independent journalism, Justin Trudeau sure has some funny ideas about the news. To wit, on Monday, the prime minister of Canada asked journalists not to name the man who killed 22 people across Nova Scotia on the weekend.

“I want to ask the media to avoid mentioning the name and showing the picture of the person involved,” he said as part of his prepared remarks. “Do not give him the gift of infamy. Let us instead focus all our intention and attention on the lives we lost and the families and friends who grieve.”

This is a popular idea, and in certain cases an understandable one: Where achieving “infamy” or martyrdom in the name of some twisted cause is clearly a murderer’s goal, society can unite in condemnation by blanking him. (There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that’s what the Nova Scotia shooter was after.) In the long term, it might even work: As I wrote this I couldn’t recall the name of the man behind the slaughter of 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand last year — but I recalled that his manifesto paid tribute to the far-right cretin behind the 2011 slaughter of young Norwegians.

Mind you, I couldn’t recall the names of the perpetrators of far more inscrutable atrocities, like the 2011 Tucson shooting or the 2017 attack on concertgoers in Las Vegas. At this point, it’s a lot of names to remember.

I’m willing to play along, as you can see, for the sake of argument. But in the immediate aftermath of mass murders — certainly at the time of Trudeau’s appeal, which was before a final death toll was even known — serious news organizations are going to report the names of mass killers. Full stop. If you’re one of these people who begs and pleads and yells at them not to, well, it’s time to stop. You might as well demand a newspaper publish in Sumerian cuneiform. You are free to look away, but it is what most people want — what they need, if they are to make any sense of the unfathomable.

Indeed, it’s tough not to notice that everyone saying “don’t use his name” … knows his name. If media outlets actually didn’t name murderers, I suspect most of those people would suddenly realize they were rather unsettled by being kept in the dark. The human brain craves order; it’s desperate to make sense of things, and it’s capable of heroic acrobatics to arrange information such that it does. Even when provided with good inputs, it often gets things wrong. Starved of information, it can wind up in some very dark places.

Think of the often wild, sometimes conspiratorial theories that swirl around mass murders when we know who perpetrated them. Now imagine if the media refused to name those perpetrators.

(Or, much more plausibly, imagine if Canadian police forces refused to.)

In fact, Trudeau went much further than saying “don’t use his name.” He said we should only pay attention to “the lives we lost and the families and friends who grieve.” Trudeau’s utterances often disintegrate upon parsing, but that’s just weird.

There are all kinds of other things we should pay attention to, just as there are after every mass murder, from the culprit’s motives to where he got his weapons to any red flags that various authorities might have missed, to how such crimes might be prevented in future.

Trudeau knows this. Last year, he unilaterally signed Canada on to the “Christchurch Call,” which demanded governments, internet service providers and platforms like YouTube and Facebook figure out ways to counter violent and extremist content of the sort that seemed to inspire the Christchurch murderer, and which he in turn used to broadcast his crimes.

Perhaps Trudeau was inspired by its somewhat chilling exhortation to signatory countries to “encourage media outlets to apply ethical standards when depicting terrorist events.” But the Christchurch Call was issued two months after the massacre in New Zealand; Trudeau’s bizarre request came not even two days after the massacre in Nova Scotia.

Ultimately, I’m not totally convinced by the no-naming rule. It doesn’t seem to scale up, for some reason. I don’t think I’ll get any angry emails for naming Serbian war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, despite their vastly greater body counts, and despite their being a major source of inspiration for the violent far-right.

Before he began his rampage, the New Zealand murderer livestreamed a Yugoslav Wars-era song praising Karadzic and promising death to Croats and Bosnian Muslims. And no one, surely, would suggest not naming the biggest inspiration of all to these wastrels: a certain former chancellor of Germany. Surely that would seem more like an act of erasure than of condemnation. There is power in naming someone, I think, and it works just as well in condemning as in does in valorizing.

Reasonable people can disagree on all these things. But the news is events, it’s places, it’s timelines — and it’s names. That’s never going to change, and no free society should want it to.