Home Invasion: The Media Shows its Bias Once Again
The media impulse to discover and document every piece of minutiae related to Omar Mateen, the shooter at the Pulse nightclub massacre, is understandable. This is what the news media should do in situations such as this: help the public understand all available information about individuals who commit horrible crimes.
However, invading the privacy of family members who may have had nothing to do with the violence committed by their husband, father, or son is another matter entirely. There is a line that is crossed when the news media enters the home that such an individual shared with his wife and their three-year old son, as two outlets- Norway’s Aftenpost and the UK’s The Daily Mail- did to the home of Omar Mateen in Orlando.
It’s not the first time an invasion of a private home like this has happened. In December of 2015, the US news media descended on the home of the couple behind the San Bernardino shootings and walked through the home live on television. Reporters turned over the entire home with no care for the personal privacy of anyone whose information they exposed (such as the driver’s license of Mrs. Farook’s mother, who had nothing to do with the attack).
A review of US media reactions to gun violence over the six months between the San Bernardino attacks and the Orlando massacre shows clearly that mainstream media- when it covers mass shootings- won’t invade the privacy of the shooter’s home or out the shooter’s family unless the shooter is a Muslim.
If we look at all mass shootings since San Bernardino and isolate only those events where 4 or more people were killed (the legal prerequisite for calling an event “mass murder”), we see this pattern clearly.
January 27, 2016. Chesapeake, Virginia. Cameron Dooley murders his entire family before turning the gun on himself. The Washington Post reports that Dooley killed himself after an hours long standoff with police. The Post pictures the exterior of the home as police board up the crime scene, but no news media make their way into the home
February 20, 2016. Kalamazoo, Michigan. Jason Brian Dalton, an Uber driver, rampages through the city randomly shooting civilians. The attacks paralyzed Kalamazoo as Dalton killed 7. After he is taken into custody, police investigate his home. The media does not.
February 23, 2016. Glendale, Arizona. Alex Buckner kills his entire family, including his 6 year old sister. Buckner also burns down the house around himself before he dies. The media does not pick through the ashes of the home after the police investigation.
February 25, 2016. Hesston, Kansas. Cedric Ford goes on a workplace rampage, killing 3 and wounding 14, before dying in a shootout with police. The media does not invade his family’s home.
February 26, 2016. Belfair, Washington. David Wayne Campbell, 51, slaughters his family then dies after a stand-off with police. Despite the horrific nature of the crime, news media does not enter the home.
March 7, 2016. Kansas City. Pablo Serrano-Vitorino shoots a total of 5 mean in 2 separate incidents in Kansas City and New Florence, Missouri. News media talks to Serrano-Vitorino’s neighbors but make no substantive effort to find or enter his home.
March 9, 2016. Wilikinsburg, Pennsylvania. USA Today reported that 6 were killed in a shooting at a cookout. Two suspects were taken into custody. Their homes were not entered by news media.
April 22, 2016. Piketon, Ohio. An unidentified shooter kills 8 members of a family in their home. The Daily Mail posts a number of pictures of the scene from the air and afar, but not from inside.
April 22, 2016. Appling Ohio. Wayne Anthony Hawes kills 5 in 2 separate shootings, and then kills himself in his home. The home is not the subject of media attention.
May 15, 2016. Moultrie, Georgia. Jeffrey Allen Peacock, 25, kills 5 people aged 20–22 in a home he then burns down. Police arrest Peacock. His home is not the subject of media attention.
June 11, 2016. Roswell, New Mexico. Juan David Villegas-Hernandez kills his wife and 4 daughters in their New Mexico home. The children are 3, 7, 11, and 14. Villegas-Hernandez is apprehended in Mexico on June 13, the same day that news media enter Mateen’s home. No news media enter the Villegas-Hernandez home.
This list of mass shooting incidents is sobering. There is no question that the victims of these attacks were slaughtered just as the victims in San Bernardino and Orlando were. There is no question that the perpetrators of these attacks were terrorizing their communities. Yet the media didn’t invade their homes and their immediate family’s private life.
Further, The LA Times posted an infographic in the wake of Orlando called “Deadliest U.S. mass shootings, 1984–2016.” In none of the instances the Times referred to, from Dylan Roof to Adam Lanza, were the homes of the perpetrators descended upon by news media (with the exceptions of the Farooks and Mateen). Particularly in the case of Lanza, his father and brother were largely left alone by news media after the Sandy Hook shooting to grieve and figure out what happened to their son and brother to make him massacre an elementary school.
When authorities and news media determine that the motivation for mass shootings and the massacring of innocents is motivated by Muslim extremism, the behavior of the news media changes. The label of “terrorist” increasingly means, in a legal sense, that the rights of the perpetrator are sharply curtailed- erased even. Local police in San Bernardino and Orlando took this idea to its logical cultural conclusion and stripped the right of privacy from the Farooks and the Mateens through their neglect.
In Orlando, police left the scene of Mateen’s home. The home was broken into overnight and international reporters entered to take pictures. The Palm Beach Post, a local paper in the Orlando area, took pictures of the interior of the home from just outside the doors and reported on the images and information gleaned from Aftenpost and The Daily Mail:
“When reporters arrived early Monday morning, the back door was open. A few international reporters entered the apartment. Palm Beach Post staff members were on the scene but did not enter the premises.”
It’s unclear how or why the back door was left open, but that didn’t deter reporters. Law enforcement too could not be bothered to protect the scene a mere 24 hours after the Pulse attack.
The Daily Mail published a photo journal of the home’s interior, including the bedroom of Mateen’s three year old son. Aftenpost was slightly more subdued, relying more on descriptions of the interior that their reporters had walked through.
This is one of the many issues of systemic racism surrounding the use of the word “terrorism” to describe acts of violence such as the Orlando massacre. By turning to such a loaded term, with all the dehumanizing otherization that it brings with it, the media allow the rights of those in the orbit of the attacker to be trampled on, their privacy and grief to be exposed, and their family moments to be the subject of intense scrutiny and investigation.
It would be one thing if this standard were applied to all mass shootings in the US, to all perpetrators of such acts of unspeakable violence. At least there would be some consistency. But because there isn’t- and because this standard of violating the privacy of only one particular group of shooter in an increasingly violent and unstable society is only applied to one group- it’s time to call this what it is: Systemic media racism.