As the story was unfolding of another tragic shooting in a Nashville children’s Christian school in Green Hills, Tennessee, responsible news outlets were reporting on information provided by investigating authorities.
During Monday afternoon’s press briefing, Metropolitan Nashville chief of police, John Drake told reporters that Hale, the perpetrator identified as transgender.
Highlights from the Washington Post:
Drake said Hale was transgender. Asked if that had played a role in what he described as a “targeted attack,” Drake said it was part of the police investigation…
Don Aaron, a police spokesman, later clarified the chief’s remarks. “Audrey Hale is a biological woman who, on a social media profile, used male pronouns,” Aaron said in an email —
Centrist establishment media outlets, such as the New York Times, AP News, and The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and others, have all relied on information of the incident provided by law enforcement and actual investigative journalism to determine a possible motive for the tragedy.
Other media, however – Fox and it’s entire echo chamber of television and print – from Newsmax, The Blaze, to World Net Daily and The Gateway Pundit – have dropped any pretense at journalistic integrity or objectivity – not that they ever had any – and immediately reached their own conclusions as to the motivation for the shooting. These sources are always the first to accuse liberal media of politicizing a tragedy and failing to wait for all of the information to come to light. This is hypocritical to say the least, since they never miss an opportunity to politicize every mass shooting to their advantage. To play the victim, accusing anyone who dares mock or criticize their “thoughts and prayers” approach to every shooting, and blindly defending the NRA, an organization that clearly plays a shameful role in perpetuating the sanctification of the gun culture in America.
Conservative Media had their motive for the shooting from the moment they heard the word “transgender.” Then it was off to the races, a virtual stampede to pin the shooting on an entire group of people. Journalistic integrity? Objectivity?
From Media Matters:
Turning Point USA’s Benny Johnson: “The Colorado Springs shooter identified as non-binary. The Denver shooter identified as trans. The Aberdeen shooter identified as trans. The Nashville shooter identified as trans. One thing is very clear: the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists.”
What is clear, is that the Colorado Springs shooter, Anderson Lee Aldrich, only identified as non-binary for the sole purpose of trolling. And online idiots, of which there are an over abundance of, ran with it as if it were fact. It’s also clear that according to the actual data that 99.09% of mass shootings have been carried out by white cisgender males, which rates his claim that the trans movement are violent terrorists, laughable.
From Newsweek:
“The trans movement is pushing more and more extremism each day,” said Oli London, a media personality who has become critical of the trans movement since deciding to de-transition. “They recruit people, indoctrinate them and pump them full of propaganda until they become filled with hate and rage.”
In the real world, it is conservative media that is “pushing more and more extremism each day”; pumping it’s viewers and readers “full of propaganda until they become filled with hate and rage.”
Tune in nightly to any program on Fox News, or Newsmax, and chances are they will be stoking bigotry and hatred toward trans people and drag queens, how their mere existence are an existential to threat to you and your children and that something should be done to stop it. This is what fills people with rage and hate, and unfortunately, all too often, we’ve seen the consequences.
Here’s Stephen Miller – former White House staff member and proud bigot himself – in the Spectator in his column, The Nashville School Shooting Brings Out The Worst In Our Media. Apparently, self-awareness is not a familiar term in the conservative vocabulary.
Highlights from the article:
The ugliness of the American media is on full show in the aftermath of a tragic mass shooting at a Nashville Presbyterian school, which left three staffers , including the head of the school and three children, all nine years old, dead…
Almost immediately, several media outlets gestured at what they see as possible motives… Tennessee’s conservative crackdown on sexualized drag shows in front of minors – and the banning of permanent surgeries and hormone treatment for minors in the state, a policy that is under consideration in several other red states. It was almost as if the “actual” victims were not the six people killed by a mass shooter in a school, but the trans community being targeted by Tennessee lawmakers…
ABC’s Terry Moran noted the passage of Tennessee’s legislation during his live report, as a possible and thus a far speculative motive. ..
Several other outlets, including NPR, the New York Times, and USA Today took time to correct Nashville law enforcement for previously misgendering the mass shooter and not using “his” desired pronouns. Prior to the confirmation of the shooter’s identity, the Washington Post, also in a since deleted tweet, wrote “GOP congressman from Nashville district”heartbroken” by shooting. A 2021 photo shows his family with firearms.”
This sorry display bears the hallmarks of the reaction to the 2017 congressional baseball field shooting by James Hodgkinson, Bernie campaign volunteer and avid MSNBC viewer. Shortly after that attack , host Joy Reid attempted to vilify House representative Steve Scalise as he was fighting for his life. “It’s a delicate thing because, obviously everybody is wishing the congressman and hoping that he recovers. But Steve Scalise has a history that we’ve all been forced to sort of ignore on race. The trope that coursed through the liberal media was that while the shooting was tragic, because of the politics of the people being shot at they kind of deserved it.
After Steve Scalise was shot, no one in the media said he or the other Congressmen deserved it. Some, like Joy Reid, simply pointed out that he had some white supremacist baggage in his past. But after the Colorado Springs night club shooting, more than a few Right-Wing Media pundits blamed it on trans people in general, and said the victims deserved it.
So, the real journalistic crimes of the centrist media are, according to Miller, allegedly mis-gendering the suspect, and daring to criticize Republican politicians who clearly seem to value their guns more than the safety of children attending public and private schools. Politicians who do nothing in the wake of these events and have openly admitted they don’t care to fix it.
But the trans community is no no more to blame for the shooting yesterday than the NRA is when a non-member commits a mass shooting – though of course that never stops journalists from linking that organization to the violence.”
He can disingenuously claim that no one is blaming the trans “community” for this act of violence, but this headline from the New York Post is indicative of every conservative media headline on the shooting:
Sources: The Washington Post; New York Post; The Spectator; Media Matters; Newsweek.
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