[LadyShea]

Media influences everyone, and helps inform our brains which put it all into categories, which in turn forms our sort of collective imagery (describe the alien most often involved in abductions, we all know exactly what they look like).

The media however cannot cause a healthy person with adequate stress coping mechanisms to gear up for war and murder movie goers, walk into a college bar with an assault rifle and start shooting kids, or build bombs and booby traps to add more death to the aftermath.

There has to be something (rage, fear, power trip, attention seeking, insanity, something) already in that person's mind to fuel the fantasies, as well as a definitely pathological lack of mental filters and "stop" signals, for someone to actually decide "Yes, okay, I am going to murder a bunch of people today". How that act plays out in the details is how it looks like in that person's head, so of course includes imagery from the media.

The problem with even accurate reporting is that it adds more imagery to the violent fantasies of other people, some with a similar lack of filters and stop signals.