On December 4, the owner of the home that the alleged San Bernardino attackers, Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, was opened to the media. The scene was pandemonium as a swarm of reporters, cameramen, and members of the public ransacked the home.
MSNBC reporter Kerry Sanders was tracked by a live shot though the Redlands home, rifling through photographs and documents on live television. MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell showed some discomfort as Sanders found pictures of children and showed them to the cable channel’s audience, but the channel kept broadcasting anyway.
In possibly the most egregious violation of privacy in this circus of shit journalism, Sanders found the driver’s license of the mother of the male shooter and held it up to the camera for over thirty seconds. Stay tuned for the inevitable vandalism/attacks/harassment of the gunman’s family as a direct result of that action.
The media’s behavior here is pretty indicative of the domestic shooting double standard. Remember how after the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, the media were allowed/forced their way into Adam Lanza’s family home after the FBI had gone through it? Remember how the media found out he was a white male and immediately searched for a way to connect him to his broader community?
Right, none of that happened. Never happens, in fact, when the shooter is a white man. The media will swarm and exhaustively cover attacks on civilians in the West when Muslims do them. But when the perpetrator is white, the questions become “how are we getting so used to this” and “is it time to talk about gun control.”
Same with this attack- for the first few hours. The contrast of coverage in the first hours after the attack and the days after the suspects were identified is striking. Coverage in the wake of the shooting followed the script. The “left” in mainstream American politics called for gun control. The right gave prayers for the victims. Once the shooters were identified as Muslims, Arabs, that narrative changed.
When the shooter is white, the questions surrounding motivation are many. There is a concerted effort to figure out “what happened” to him, what in his background could have made him so “troubled.” The white shooter is a “loner,” he is “mentally disturbed.”
When the shooter is a person of color in general, and a Muslim in particular, there are no questions. Generalizations and assumptions take the place of individualized motivations and mental illness, background and past.
That’s how we get to the point where the media invades the home of dead suspects in a shooting and shows the world their family’s personal information: without individualizing the attackers when their skin tone is insufficiently pale, they are seen as part of a monolithic mindless mass of danger, not as the just-as-disturbed and troubled people that their white, male counterparts are.
We’re only three days into this story, so there will surely be more of these blatant incidents of media bias around the San Bernardino shootings. Whether or not they will reach the heights of MSNBC doxing family members of the shooter is unclear. What is clear is that now that the shooters have been thoroughly “othered” by the media and law enforcement due to their religious and ethnic backgrounds, the storyline will follow its predictable, dehumanizing narrative.
So what’s new? Always the shock when the perpetrator is white; “how could this happen?” When the perpretrator is brown, as Mr. Higgins noted, no questions are asked, as with non-whites, there is apparently not even enough curiosity to wonder why.
Eoin
While I agree to your point that there is a lot of public bigotry involved when a shooter is a Muslim and the differences in opinion making are striking, I don’t think the media would respect the privacy of a white christian shooter. I think the media in general doesn’t respect any privacy at all.
The difference with the media going into the rooms where the shooter lived, I would see as that the Farooks’ apartment was rented and given back to the landlord directly after the shooting, and the landlord then invited the media into it while Adam Lanza lived in a house that was owned by his familiy, so there was no landlord who could have invited the media into it.
Weeks later, as a bank aquired the house of the Lanza family to have it destroyed, the media hysteria was already gone. But I would be quite sure, had there been a landlord opening the doors of Lanza’s home to the media soon after the shooting, the media would have behaved not much better regarding the privacy of the family as they did with Farook. The media has just no ethics, whatever the case.
what a bunch of whiny BS. the so-called “white man” who shot up the school was outed as an autistic oddball who did not fit in socially with his peers from very early in the media ‘investigation’. In other words-people had a pretty good inkling this ‘white’ kid was off his rocker and the questions following would be the why’s and how’s he came to possess such weapons in light of his disabilities.
The SB shooting was a puzzle from the start and the media-in cahoots with its left leaning Obama admin. (who simply refuses-like an obstinate child-to acknowledge the obvious) withheld the shooters last names as long as possible for what reason? Everybody knows the answer to that. So when the name was finally released it was hardly a surprise at what conclusions might be drawn.
It is very sad for the bulk of US Muslims to have to live with the discomfort and horror of waiting each time a new terror attack occurs to find out the attackers names. So-blaming Obama’s media for treating two mass murderers privacy as sacred after they had been killed is really nothing but useless btchng. Author may want to go read up on what happened when two ruthless ‘white’ killers named Bonnie and Clyde were gunned down. Displaying their naked dead and shot up bodies to a very hungry pubic was considered the penalty of their fame.
And besides-any expectation that the MSM works with any directive of morality except on only a strictly personal reporter-by-reporter basis is ridiculous. The MSM can no longer be trusted for any amount of ‘morality’ which is generally widely known by most internationally informed readers.
Please…
The ability of the press to access the homes of these terrorist was not a result of selective reporting but the incompetence of the Justice Department and law-enforcement by failing to secure that as part of the crime scene. I’m quite sure that if they were allowed to do so, the media would also have sent Cameraman into the houses of Adam Lanza and other schizophrenics who committed mass shooting for reasons unrelated to Islam.
Of course there is a double standard here. Anyone with a brain can see it. Despite the overwhelming amount of evidence proving that these two terrorists were motivated but their Islamic faith, The liberal, supposedly Jewish controlled, media has bent over backwards to try to whitewash this. Major news outlets tried to connect it to a nearby Planned Parenthood, they tried to say it was workplace violence, they even tried to suggest that perhaps the female terrorist was suffering from postpartum depression.
Rather than calling it what it is and standing up like a leader should, your joke of a president is dodging the obvious and trying to use this as a foothold on a call for gun control. Similarly, the attorney general of the United States has vowed to crack down as a result of this… But not on further acts of terror but rather those who have the unmitigated audacity to speak out against like minded radical Muslims.
If MW actually had any credibility, the audacity to claim that the bias in the coverage of this terrorist attack has is anything other than pro-Muslim would cause that to evaporate.
The Hamas/CAIR press conference – how hilarious watching the brother in law’s handlers jump out in front of him when he was getting off script.
Yes, there is double standard but the Muslim terrorists have have been the beneficiaries… At least up until this point. MW and the liberal media and the other Muslim apologists are totally over playing her hand on this one and even those who have previously been on the fence are going to open their eyes up to radical Islam.
The poor dears, being doxxed and “othered” like that.
This reads like something from an Oberlin College sophomore.