For years, James Alan Fox has believed the media plays a big role in misrepresenting mass killings. Now, he works with some of the biggest news outlets in the nation to combat misinformation and inflammatory, exaggerated facts that often cause panic among the public.
Since 2012, Fox, a Northeastern professor in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, has worked with USA Today and the Associated Press, or AP, to build and maintain the country’s most comprehensive and widely-cited mass killing database. The overarching goal of the project is to fight misinformation, which is not uncommon after mass killing events, and prevent the public from making fear-based decisions, Fox told The News.
“[The database] collects all sorts of data that other [databases] do not,” Fox said. “We do that to help prevent misinformation, to help the public understand the true data.”
The database has tracked mass killings, defined as an event in which four or more people are killed in a 24-hour window, in the United States since 2006, including public mass killings, family mass killings and felony and suspected felony mass killings.
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