University of Virginia Shooting Raises Questions of Missed Warning Signs, Media Coverage
“After a lengthy investigation, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have determined that the shooting death of Walter Scott, a black teenager in South Carolina, was a case of self-defense,”
A white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri shot dead an unarmed African American, Mike Brown, has shot dead at least 30 people in the last two days since the shooting and the police department appears to be treating the situation as a riot rather than a legitimate shooting. The news media has been largely silent, perhaps because this story has been largely ignored by many journalists.
The same is true in Charlottesville, Virginia. The media has barely mentioned the event in Charlottesville over the past few days because mainstream media simply doesn’t like to cover what they see as “anti-government” action. The media’s reluctance to cover this story isn’t because the police are a threat to the establishment, but rather because, after the shooting of an unarmed man by a police officer, the media simply doesn’t like to cover self-defense.
Many in the media have taken to calling the events in Charlottesville a “civil rights protest” to avoid controversy and to protect their image as “balance” and “neutral”. And yet, without any significant coverage in the mainstream media, self-defense has been largely ignored.
The media’s response to the events in Charlottesville is perhaps the most telling indicator of how things really are. Journalists have largely ignored the violence and have simply shifted the blame to the white supremacists for the deaths, while failing to mention that it was the people of Charlottesville who were the victims in this case. Journalists, in essence, are blaming the victims for the violence instead of the organizers who started it.
That same pattern is being played out in Ferguson. In the wake of the shooting death of Mike Brown, the media has taken to characterizing it as a riot, while failing to acknowledge that the shooting was a product of the white supremacists’ violence and the police department’s failures to stop them. The media, in essence, is characterizing the victims as the aggressors and blaming the police for the violence.
Here, too, the
