This is reprinted with permission from The News & Observer of Raleigh.

The shooting started inside Pinelake Health and Rehab Center shortly after 10 a.m. on Sunday, March 29. Before church was out, family members had been alerted and were trying to get to the nursing home to find out whether their loved ones were OK. By lunchtime, news crews were on their way.

For two days, satellite trucks left tracks in the greening grass of survivors' homes in tiny Carthage and rural Moore County. Newspaper reporters and photographers hogged the tables at the wi-fi coffee shop in town.

Their stories went out to the world: eight dead, including a nurse. Grandfathers and great-grandmothers in their 70s, 80s and 90s, some of them shot in wheelchairs they couldn't maneuver down the halls.

By that Wednesday, all save a handful of the media had gone, moving on to other stories.

On the following Friday, a man in Binghamton, N.Y., killed 13 people before apparently committing suicide. A day later, a man "lying in wait" attacked police in Pittsburgh, killing three.

Do we hear too little about mass homicides, or have we heard too much, to the point that we are desensitized to the violence? How should the media -- and the public -- respond?

Following are two short Q&A interviews with two authorities on the subject of news coverage of violent events and its effect on public attitudes.

Workplace Violence

Barry Nixon, interviewed in this section, is executive director of the National Institute for the Prevention of Workplace Violence Inc. in Orange County, Calif., and is California's workplace violence consultant.

He helps businesses and governments reduce the likelihood of workplace violence and improve their response when incidents happen.

Q: With 600-some people killed in the workplace each year in this country, has society become desensitized to mass killings such as the one in Carthage?

A: We are inundated with news stories about the war and people getting killed and certainly mass murders, so maybe, yes, at a macro level.

But at a local level and certainly at a human level, people are still shocked at these kinds of incidents. And everybody has a sensitivity to the elderly, so this is one that I would think people are not just ho-hum about.

Q: Is the frequency of workplace shootings going up, or does it just seem that way, starting with the post-office shootings of the 1980s?

A: In the 1980s, there was a landmark incident [in Edmund, Okla., where a postman shot and killed 14 people before shooting himself in the head] that kind of put this issue on the map.

When the government looked into it, they were kind of startled at the statistics, and it became a legitimate workplace issue.

Overall, homicides in the workplace have actually gone down. In the '80s, an average of 750 people were killed each year at work. In the '90s, it went up to 1,000 a year. So far this decade, it's in the low 600s. But when you look year to year, from 2006 to 2007, there was a 3 percent increase. We'll see what the 2008 data shows.

Q: How does press coverage affect the public's perception of these kinds of incidents?

A: I'm not sure the press could do anything different. They're kind of giving a snapshot. When I see these stories, I know there is always more to it than just that quick bit you hear on the news.

And the press doesn't cover all of them. They cover the ones that are newsworthy and get somebody's attention. But these events happen every day.

To report them all, they'd have to have a homicide-at-work column where they covered it every day. It's not a rare event. They have to cherry pick.

Bloodshed in Media

Mary Beth Oliver, interviwed below, is a professor of film, video and media studies and co-director of the Media Effects Laboratory at Penn State University.

Her research and teaching focus on media effects.

Q: Has media exposure inured the public to mass shootings?

A: There is a whole lot of research on the notion of desensitization, and it's a pretty robust effect. It doesn't take long for people to become desensitized to media violence.

Insofar as a little bit of excitement is a good thing, one implication is that once we become desensitized, we need to turn to more graphic or extreme images to experience that same level of excitement.

Whether the media are playing into this, I don't know. It certainly is consistent with the notion that if it bleeds, it leads.

Q: What are the effects of heavy or frequent media coverage of violent events?

A: If the media is showing a lot of something, we're going to think it's more common than it is. ... That can lead to a sense that we are more vulnerable to violence, because we hear about these things.

There is a whole body of research ... that says this makes us believe that the world is much more frightening and dangerous than it actually is.

Q: Should the news media do something different in the way it covers violence?

A: There's something researchers call exemplification.

It notes that when journalists are talking about a story, they might begin with an example. Let's say we were going to be talking about prison reform, and I started the story with an example of a person who was let out of prison and then went on some sort of crime spree.

Then later, I cite statistics saying that that sort of behavior is really rare.

That example will carry the weight; it will override any sort of statistical information that I'm going to give.