BROOKE GLADSTONE From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This past weekend, we once again witnessed murder and mayhem. You know the story as well as we do...
[CLIP]
NEWS REPORT Taking you now to Buffalo, New York, where police officials are discussing a mass shooting that happened in a supermarket. CBS News has confirmed at least ten people are dead, more are injured.
NEWS REPORT Witnesses say a man armed with a rifle entered that market and opened fire.
NEWS REPORT Among the lives tragically lost. 86 year old Ruth Whitfield visiting her husband at a nursing home. 77 year old Pearl Young, described by her loved ones as a woman of faith and a pillar of the community. And top security guard Aaron Salter, a 30 year old veteran of the Buffalo Police Force who tried to stop the gunman. Potentially saving even more lives. Then there was Heyward Patterson, a local driver and church deacon killed while helping a shopper load groceries in his car. [END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE The stories are heartbreaking, enraging and worst of all, deeply familiar. And so is the coverage, which is still prey to the same errors made the last time and the time before that. Starting with the initial reports.
CRAIG SILVERMAN Misidentification of people, usually victims of perpetrators, very consistent.
BROOKE GLADSTONE Craig Silverman, author of the Poynter Institute's Regret the Error blog.
CRAIG SILVERMAN We'll often see mistaken numbers in terms of the number of victims, in terms of the number of perpetrators and that kind of thing as well.
[CLIP]
NEWS REPORT At least seven people have been shot and killed in a mass shooting at a Topps grocery store. [END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE If the death toll is wrong or mounts, we'll hear it rise. Then we wait for the name, the perp, someone to blame. But as Tom Teves, who lost his son in the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting, told us in 2015, that's a fraught attribution.
[CLIP]
TOM TEVES When we talk to different journalists and they talk about what we have to research their backgrounds to find out what motivated them, I much applaud that. You do need to research their background. What you don't need to do is use their names and their likenesses. Definitely, if they're at large, use their names and their likenesses to bring them to justice. But once they're apprehended, that's really no longer part of the story other than to create a call to action. For another like minded killer to take his plans and his thoughts and make them deeds. [END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE Once we've nailed the who, what, when, where and how, we're obliged to shift our focus to the why. But that path, too, is riddled with pitfalls. In 2019, Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, warned us against highlighting not just the shooter's name, but words as well.
[CLIP]
JOAN DONOVAN It's very important for journalists as well as researchers not to allow attackers, as well as white nationalists and white supremacists to drive our attention to their issues and their claims. When we link to these things outside of our own articles, we invite our audiences to move away from our own explanations and framings and into the anonymous forums. Which heroize this attacker. [END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE Even calling their reasonings manifestos lends them a glamor they don't deserve...
[CLIP]
JOAN DONOVAN This is not really a manifesto. It's much more like a rant or a screed. The other thing that we have to understand is that this screed functions a lot more like a press kit. We're also not going to get the conversation in the public that we need if we focus on this person's words and ideas. [END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE Still, the public has the right to know what delusions inflame the killer. Especially if they have broad currency. The trick is not to make them any broader.
[CLIP]
NEWS REPORT Law enforcement officials say this alleged shooter posted a 180 page manifesto online just days before the attack. And it draws on and references replacement theory at least 28 times. Now, at one time, this was considered, quote unquote, fringe. This is being amplified and pushed by some very influential people in America and specifically on the right. For example, Fox News host Tucker Carlson. [END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE Carlson declared himself shocked – shocked! Shrugging off the replacement threat that he'd long flagged, and anyway, that's not why the killer did it right. Tucker defaulted to another trope: mental illness. Very often applied to white male shooters because, you know, their violent actions aren't a racial characteristic, just weird. Another fave Tucker trope: it's all Joe Biden's fault.
[CLIP]
TUCKER CARLSON So how did the adults around him let this happen? In a country with functioning leadership, we would be asking that question. The signs of mental illness were certainly there. The people in charge miss those signs, but they let a killer slip through.
NEWS REPORT An 18 year old white male has been arrested and charged with first degree murder for a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. In what authorities called an act of racially motivated violent extremism. [END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE But this mass murderer did not describe himself as racially motivated. He called himself a racist. He chose that Topp's grocery store because it served mostly black people. Even calling him an extremist ignores the fact that in our history, this moment is not especially extreme.
MICHAEL GERMAN We have to understand how our society itself is shaped by the history of our founding as a white supremacist project. Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE Retired FBI agent Michael German, now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice, Liberty and National Security Program, spoke to us last year.
MICHAEL GERMAN So it's not as if this is some extreme belief system, a bunch of crazy people on the margins invented, for the most part. They're actually delving into the history of the United States of America in a way most Americans never do. And taking what were foundational documents explaining why it was these European colonists believe that God gave them the authority to dominate other cultures and commit genocide, in doing so. White supremacist today has actually a better understanding of our history than than the history most of us learn in school.
[CLIP]
VICTOR BLACKWELL Listen, I was counting in the car talk with my producer. I've done 15 of these. At least, the ones I could count.
[AMBI CONTINUES UNDER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE CNN's Victor Blackwell.
VICTOR BLACKWELL And we keep having the conversation about Democrats will say guns, Republicans will say mental health. And nothing will change, and I'll probably do another one this year. Family after family having nowhere to go with their grief. We'll get into a political conversation later, but... Is this the way we're supposed to live? Are we destined to just keep doing this city after city? Have we just resigned that this is what we are going to be? [END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE Let's end this segment with another trope Einstein's famous observation that he never made. About how the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That quote, according to the Professor of Buzzkill History blog, anyway, first appeared in a 1981 document published by Narcotics Anonymous, apparently trying to convince its members that attempting to kick a deadly habit on your own was folly. And yet that's what we as members of the Fourth Estate keep trying to do. We know a majority of Americans want more gun control. Why can't we get it? For the same reason we need it so badly. Because we're suffering from a cancer that disables our ability to provide. It's in our history, our media, and most devastatingly, our politics. Not the horse race, but the rot at the root, where we now see inevitable acts of nature. We should see injustice and focus on consequences with our eyes fixed on Washington, on Wall Street, on the media, and all who enrich themselves by enabling murder. If we hammer on about anything, it should be about consequences and personal responsibility as individuals and a nation. It's cynicism that's killing us. If we live up to our old principles for the first time... maybe we can move on.
Coming up, journalism in emergency mode. This is On the Media.
