| BMaker11 said: A lot of news stories shouldn't make national headlines. But the disdain for this case "not being reported" on actually is, in fact, about an agenda, or so the people complaining claim it is. You can sell race baiting. You can sell "intolerance" (referencing gay marriage, for example). You can't sell Muslims being victims. No, they're the "enemy" and are, statistically, one of the most distrusted groups in America. And the situation makes white people look bad, if this guy really did kill them because they are Muslim. The culmination of that is the agenda: if Muslims are the perpetrators, they're terrorists, Islam is to blame, etc; if the victims are Muslim....ignore it. Because that would shake up the status quo and show that Muslims, by and large, are good people. |
I think you're confusing simple bias with having an agenda. The media prefers stories that tie into larger stories or fit neatly into an existing template because, well, they're lazy. Since there is a long established pattern of individual Muslims displaying sudden jihad syndrome, in the absence of any facts they have a lot more to talk about in the meantime, and ever since 9/11 terrorism has proven to be ratings gold. So of course any such incident is likely to be instant news. But it's rare that any significant terrorist attack isn't followed shortly thereafter by a report on how the local Muslim community fears a backlash, so I don't agree at all that Muslims are generally tarred with one brush or viewed as always being the enemy by the media.
In this case the assumption is that this would have been big news if the killer were Muslim (which it might have been, for the reasons above) or if the victims weren't Muslim (which we'll never know as there's no way to prove that), and we've instead ended up with a situation where this is a national story precisely because the victims are Muslim even though it seems to have nothing to do with why they were killed.
