The wildly irresponsible media coverage of "Joker"

The irresponsible media discourse surrounding Joker has led distributor Warner Bros. to tighten security at its Los Angeles and New York premieres, and bears some similarities to the exaggerated coverage of the 2012 shooting in Aurora, Colorado, which saw a young man enter a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises and gun down twelve people. An initial report from ABC News, quoting then New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, alleged that the shooter, whose hair was dyed red, had called himself “The Joker.” Then The New York Times made matters worse, reporting that, “Witnesses told the police that Mr. Holmes said something to the effect of ‘I am the Joker,’ according to a federal law enforcement official, and that his hair had been dyed or he was wearing a wig.” And thus, a myth was born.

But those reports turned out to be false. As the Denver Post later concluded, “Investigators heard no witness talking about the Joker…And no police officer claimed [the shooter] called himself the Joker.” If that weren’t enough, the shooter himself confessed to a psychiatrist that he did not dye his hair red to emulate the Joker (whose hair is green, by the way), but that he did so because “red suggests bravery.” Because of the rampant media speculation, though, the shooter’s inmates did eventually take to calling him “The Joker,” to which the shooter remarked, “They kind of turned me into a supervillain.”