When a mass killer is transgender, liberal media suddenly look away
Quin Hillyer
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One of the biggest reasons a large segment of the public loathes the liberal media, namely the media’s egregious, ideological double standards, has been on full display in coverage of Monday’s school shooting in Nashville.
The media have bent over backward to downplay, or even refuse to report entirely, the fact that the shooter had been “identifying” as a gender not actually her own.
NASHVILLE SHOOTER WAS RECEIVING TREATMENT FOR EMOTIONAL DISORDER
This is not to say the shooter’s transvestite or transgender status necessarily has anything to do with her murderous rampage, although some early signs indicate it may have played a role. Until more is known about her motives, the transgender status merits mention just as one of many factoids, one not heavily stressed, and certainly not to indicate that others of transgender status are more likely to have homicidal tendencies.
On the other hand, there is no denying that every time the media even think they discern some right-leaning affiliation of the perpetrator, the media put those alleged motives or affiliations at the top of the stories and obsess over the allegedly deadly tendencies of “right-wing rage.” This holds true even when it turns out there is no rightist connection at all, and sometimes the eventual evidence shows leftward identities or affiliations even though, for days, the media blamed the abominable behavior on conservatives.
In the case of the Nashville shooter (whose name I refuse to dignify because I believe one motive for such actions is to put one’s name in the history books), the media made much, in the first few hours, of the fact she was a woman. Female mass murderers, the reports all said, are rare. It was thus entirely newsworthy, according to the liberal media’s own established standards, that it turned out the woman self-identified as a man. Indeed, the Associated Press stylebook insists that people be referenced by their “preferred” gender identity, and explicitly “condemns ‘deadnaming,’ or referring to a transgender person’s previous name, because that ‘can be akin to using a slur and can cause feelings of gender dysphoria to resurface.’”
Yet in the Nashville case, the AP still, as of midafternoon Tuesday, a full 27 hours after the murders, was referring to her by her given female name, not by her preferred name. In short, they were deadnaming her. Not until the 17th paragraph does the story even mention her uncertain gender.
The 17th paragraph at least is better than CBS Mornings, which spent more than 10 minutes opening its show Tuesday with reports about Nashville. Not a single time did anybody make a single reference to the killer’s transgender status. Not once. To do so would be to condemn the media’s earlier reporting that she was female.
The self-identified media ethics center known as the Poynter Institute even promulgated this advice: “Both news and entertainment media have contributed to the inaccurate characterization of transgender people as dangerous and unhinged. Be cautious of contributing to that trope.”
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The message is clear: The media will bend over backward to kowtow to transgender ideology when it benefits the gender bender yet will also do backflips to hide a transgender status if somebody might draw negative inferences. Too bad the media honchos aren’t concerned about contributing to inaccurate characterizations of conservative people as dangerous and unhinged. Poynter is absolutely delighted to publish that “trope.”
The hypocritical unfairness of the coverage is blatant. Of course, transgender people in general shouldn’t be blamed for mass shootings. Neither should conservatives. Yet the latter are eagerly blamed, while a basic fact of a shooter’s gender confusion is deliberately, dishonestly hidden. How sickening.