The general media paradigm is that every Muslim terrorist is not motivated by Islam, ignores minority mass shooters, and insists that every white mass shooter is a racist. There have been fairly clear white supremacist mass shooters, in Charleston, in Poway, and in Squirrel Hill.

And they were fairly open about it.

Racist mass shooters go in expecting to die and whether they’re black or white, like the mass shooter in Jersey City, they want people to know why they’re doing this.

The Atlanta spa shooter told the police that he had issues with sex addiction and wanted to shoot up businesses involved with the sex trade.

The media kept vocally suggesting that they might be lying because they desperately want him to be a white supremacist so they can wipe away the fact that most of the attacks on Asians have been by black people.

It’s understandable that The Root would push to reframe the shootings to fit the familiar political agenda.

There’s a line connecting this act of terror…  to gentrification, to red-lining, to racial profiling, to gerrymandering, to voter oppression, to mass incarceration, to the war on drugs, to the subprime mortgage crisis, to the vast disparities in both COVID deaths and who receives COVID vaccinations, to how the men and women who stormed the capitol just went home and had dinner with their families afterward. 

Freeing criminals is what’s behind the attacks on Asians. This is political appropriation of someone else’s tragedy of the grossest kind.

But Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post’s media columnist, is typical of the media’s narrative hectoring.

And so it was on Wednesday when Jay Baker, a captain with the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, described the motivations of the man accused of killing eight people, six of them Asian women, at spas in the Atlanta area.

While hedging a bit, Baker told reporters there was no immediate reason to think that the White shooter had a racial motivation.

Why not? Well, because that’s what the alleged shooter told police, Baker said at a press conference Wednesday…

There was also his utter failure to question the suspect’s own depiction of what motivated him, to understand the intersection of racism and misogyny, or to note that many communities have reported a spike of anti-Asian violence this year.

Even more dismaying, though, was the first round of media coverage: tweets, news alerts and early stories from nearly every major news organizations that essentially parroted Baker’s assertion that this horrible crime didn’t seem to be racially motivated, and wasn’t being immediately categorized as a hate crime.

Has the media come up with any evidence that the spa shooter was a racist? If the media had, we’d be hearing about it non-stop.

Should reporting be grounded at least on some loose level in facts?

Sullivan complains that the police are taking the shooter’s word for it? Frankly, why not? 

Even in this insane pro-crime era, the shooter is not getting out no matter what he attributes his motivation to. He has no incentive to lie. The media does