Media framing of Las Vegas shooter shows the bias in how violence perpetrated by whites is covered
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As Americans, our relationship to truth and reality is often quite disingenuous. There are plenty of examples where this can be found. Practically any counterstory that presents an honest assessment of the inequality and injustice in this country, particularMedia framing of Las Vegas shooter shows the bias in how violence perpetrated by whites is covered
As Americans, our relationship to truth and reality is often quite disingenuous. There are plenty of examples where this can be found. Practically any counterstory that presents an honest assessment of the inequality and injustice in this country, particularly directed at people of color, is met with profound resistance and denial. This is to be expected. So many of us, for generations, have bought into the narrative that America is so special, so star-spangled awesome that it’s unfathomable that we could be anything less than the exemplary nation that every other country on the planet wants to emulate. But this refusal to see ourselves for who we really are isn’t serving us well—in fact just the opposite. We cannot live in a perpetual state of ignorance and think we aren’t being grossly harmed by it. If anything, horrific incidents like the mass shooting in Las Vegas should offer us an opportunity to come clean. By now we know that Stephen Paddock was the gunman who, for reasons not yet clear, decided to open fire on a crowd of people attending a concert on Sunday night. He is being described as a quiet man, a retiree millionaire, with no history of violence that would lead him to commit such an act. In fact, it seems as if the media and the police really want us to believe that, prior to Sunday night, Paddock was a fundamentally decent human being. It should also come as no surprise to us that Paddock was also white. Because only in America would we go to such lengths to avoid criminalizing a wealthy white man even after he murdered almost 60 people and injured hundreds more. Despite the scale of the attack and Paddock’s being armed with more than 10 rifles, Las Vegas Sheriff Joe Lombardo immediately dismissed any ties to terrorism, classifying Paddock, a white male from a rural town 80 miles from Las Vegas, as a “local individual” and a “lone wolf.” We have yet to determine whether Paddock was motivated by anyone or anything, so many are tiptoeing around terms such as “terrorist.” But if Paddock were Muslim, his status as a local individual would be entirely irrelevant, and the motive of “Islamic terrorism” or “jihad” would likely be immediately assumed, even without any evidence. Read more