This kind of reporting is important to recognize and call out, for a bunch of reasons.

in media •  11 months ago 

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https://www.advocate.com/news/iowa-school-shooter-gender-identity

First, the more people draw attention to it, the more people will start to realize how criminally awful and overtly biased our news media actually is.

Secondly, there's a lot of meta-level reporting and academic papers that get produced with the aim of tallying the number of instances of political violence in the US and attributing those instances to one ideology or another.

But the vast majority of the news media has radically different standards for what instances of violence they believe are worth reporting, and use totally different language depending on who perpetrated a crime and who the victims were.

When the victims are in an "oppressed" group, which generally means racial/ethnic minorities, LGBTQ..., and women (with bonus points awarded to anyone who checks multiple "intersectional" boxes), then it's already a national news story. If it's a white male victim... it'll get mentioned but probably won't be a major headline.

If they discover that it's an "oppressor" group member (white men, and particularly conservative / non-progressive white men) that committed the crime, suddenly we have a week or more of national conversation about it, and this will inevitably include numerous think pieces and panel discussions about how exactly conservative political "rhetoric" caused the criminal to target these poor oppressed people.

This has been happening most all of my life, but I started really noticing it when G.W. Bush was in office. It's only gotten more extreme and more overt over the last 20 years.

Alternatively, however, if the perpetrator is in an oppressed category, and doubly so if the victim was in an oppressor category -- even if the perpetrator is explicitly clear that they were politically motivated -- the story will get buried, few to no follow-up stories will be written unless absolutely necessary, and we will not get weeks of panel shows and important think pieces about the event.

Moreover, the ultimate fault will STILL lie with conservatives / non-progressives.

This is where you get all these "Conservatives Pounce" stories... but it's the same bias that goes into the media blindly believing Hamas on just about everything and routinely calling Israel an oppressor / apartheid state.

The narrative is that there are oppressors and oppressed people, which we can identify simply by looking at a person's race and gender, and oppressors are always at fault, regardless of who the perpetrator and victims are in any crime story.

Now... It's pretty easy to see the bias in all this... But what most people don't realize is the downstream effect it has on what people believe about which groups of people are more or less dangerous. It's how you end up believing that right wing people commit all the violence and left wing people never do anything violent, when in reality most of the time you simply haven't heard of the instances when left wing people engage in terrorism or targeted attacks.

It completely distorts people's perception of reality, which I think is the point.

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