WASHINGTON — Stephen Paddock gunned down 59 people and injured hundreds of others in the Las Vegas mass shooting Sunday night. The 64-year-old took aim at concert-goers from a high-rise hotel suite and killed himself before SWAT units entered the room.
As investigators piece together Paddock’s background and a possible motive, people took to social media to voice concerns that media coverage has not been balanced. They noticed that a certain descriptor was missing because Paddock was white.
Everyone knows (even if won’t admit it) that in the early stages of mass shooting, “no signs of terrorism” means: “shooter isn’t Muslim.” https://t.co/zFWDySMrET
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 2, 2017
The lone wolf. The local shooter. The gunman. Any and everything, but terrorist. Wonder why.
— Ava DuVernay (@ava) October 2, 2017
50 dead. Over 400 in the hospital. And we continue to call this a LONE WOLF? Call it TERRORISM because that’s what it is.
— Emmy Rossum (@emmyrossum) October 2, 2017
It’s something Indira Lakshmanan, Newmark chair in journalism ethics at Poynter, noticed as well.
“When there are terrorist attacks, or, I should say, when there are shootings or attacks that involve a Muslim perpetrator, we are very quick in the media to jump to the conclusion that this must be terrorism-related,” she told WTOP in an interview Tuesday.
“And it’s not just the media who [do] this; politicians and authorities often jump to these conclusions and we end up reporting those assumptions. When the attacker is a white person, however, the same bias does not exist and we tend not to jump to that conclusion until we have sufficient evidence that that may be true.”
But for Scott White, professor and director of cybersecurity at the George Washington University College of Professional Studies, the terrorism label is complicated.
“From a perspective of just fear, we can say it’s terror, but no — ultimately we have to look at things like the FBI’s definition, which is the unlawful use of force or violence to coerce a government or civilian population in furtherance of a political or social objective,” he said.
White says that unless the shooter is aligned to a terrorist organization such as ISIS, that definition of terrorism cannot apply, even though the act may feel similar to others.
Lakshmanan also mentions that legal definition of domestic terrorism in her recent piece for Poynter. As investigators continue to figure out Paddock’s motives, Lakshmanan suggests that caution should be exercised not just for white attackers but also for Muslim ones.
“My point is only that we as journalists need to be really careful in how we frame stories so we don’t shape public opinion in a certain way that might be wrong,” she said.
In her piece, Lakshmanan also takes a look at how media coverage of mass violence differs when the suspect is white as opposed to a non-white Muslim.
“In our minds, for understandable reasons due to the huge and appalling death toll of 3,000 people from 9/11, we associate jihadis and Muslims with terrorist attacks. But in fact, the statistics show that white people are more often involved in domestic terrorism in this country.”
Citing studies and government statistics, Lakshmanan argues that in recent years, attacks led by white supremacists or anti-government Americans outnumber those linked to Muslim terrorists.
She urged listeners to be “educated, news literate consumers” and pointed to research done by The Center for Investigative Reporting and The New America Foundation to help guide them.
But according to Lakshmanan, the media also has a responsibility to share.
