Charleston Shooting Displays How the Media Covers White Terrorism

As the harrowing story of the Wednesday shooting deaths of nine people at Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church by a white suspect is still unfolding, much of the early reporting has acknowledged what Charleston police Chief Greg Mullen said Thursday morning, that “I do believe this was a hate crime.”

Police have arrested Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white man with strong ties to several white supremacist groups in the area. Yet there’s also, enragingly, already been the typical downplaying and misdirection that so often emerges in these types of crimes.

So let’s look at and remember the facts — a white man opened fire in a black church and murdered nine people, in a state where the Confederate flag still flies over the capitol. A cousin of one of the victims told reporters that a survivor told her the suspect said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Let’s start from there.

Fox News correspondents were swift to caution that “Most people jump to conclusions about race" and "maybe this was a “War on Christians” thing. And USA Today, searching for patterns in “deadly rampages,” ran a report called Behind the Bloodshed and observed, “A mass killing often involves a failed safety net: protective orders that didn't’t work, gaps in the mental health system, lapses in immigration enforcement.”

But as an astute Facebook commenter noted, “This story claims that one of the reasons for increased mass killings is a lapse in immigration control… yet, NONE of the mass killings given as examples, supposedly the worst since 2006, were perpetrated by some one that was an illegal immigrant?” Indeed, only one of the mass murderers mentioned in the feature — Virginia Tech killer Seung Hui Cho — was not born in the US. He did however have permanent resident status, so his crime was not a failure of immigration control.

The New York Times reported just earlier this week, “Right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities.” That’s not a failure of immigration law, or an attack on Christianity, or anything else that fits into a convenient to conservatives narrative. This is what terrorism looks like and right-wing, anti-government extremism is the leading source of ideological violence in America.”

Terrorism is defined by wikipedia as violent acts (or the threat of violent acts) intended to create fear, perpetrated for an economic, religious, political, or ideological goal, and which deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants.

Many people were outraged at the initial lack of media coverage, and others didn't hesitate to define the act as terrorism. Some believe this is because the perpetrator not a Muslim and the victims were black.

Public figures have expressed their disdain for the media's response to this shooting, including actor Rob Lowe.

Frustration regarding media's and the country's collective response to white male criminals permeated much of the grief shared on social media. People compared coverage Muslim and black shooters have received in the past, as distinct from white male murderers.

The fact is that these heinous and evil killings represent terrorism at its absolute worse. Perhaps the time has come for Americans to take a long, hard look at who the true terrorist really are. It may scare many people to discover the real truth, but without it the true terror may never end.