What Was the Washington Post Thinking with This Story About the Las Vegas Shooter?
In times of crisis, like the mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday night, Americans turn to the media for explanation. We want to trust our major newspapers to deliver the facts, to abate our fears of continuing violence, to tell us how we can help. The breaking news reporters who deliver this to us quickly and accurately, sometimes at great danger to themselves, should be commended. Then there’s the idiot at the Washington Post who wrote this headline:
The original article appeared on Monday morning, and was quickly syndicated to other major national newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Denver Post. That piece's authors were William Wan and Aaron C. Davis. Since then, additional bylines have been added and the piece's text and tone of the piece have changed significantly. Here’s the original opening paragraph, casting Stephen Paddock in familiar terms:
Before he opened fire late Sunday — killing at least 50 people at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip — the gunman Stephen Paddock lived a quiet life for years in a small town outside Las Vegas. A retired man, Paddock often visited Las Vegas to gamble and take in concerts, his relatives said. Public records show he was a licensed pilot who owned two planes. And he had a hunting license from Alaska. For several years, he appeared to live in Mesquite, Tex. But property records show he chose to move to another town named Mesquite in Nevada, where he bought a home in 2013, and he has been living there ever since. Paddock’s family said there was nothing in his past that would suggest violence.
“However could such an innocent-seeming, retired, country music-loving white man commit such an atrocity?” it seems to read. You can almost see the writers wringing their hands with confusion.
The updated version of the article casts Paddock's past in a far more sinister light:
He liked to bet big, wagering tens of thousands of dollars in a sitting. He owned homes in four states but preferred staying in casino hotels, sometimes for weeks at a time, as he worked the gambling machines. He grew up the son of a convicted bank robber who was constantly running from the law. But in his own life, Stephen Paddock, 64, had stayed out of trouble until Sunday night, when he suddenly unleashed a firestorm of bullets from his casino hotel room, killing at least 59 people and injuring more than 500 more on the Las Vegas Strip.
It's never a breaking news reporter’s job to diagnose a killer, or hypothesize about their intentions acts after the fact—this remains, for now, the job of the police. But the headline change alone shows that the Washington Post regretted its quick assumptions about Stephen Paddock. The new headline reads:
No more talk of his tastes in music or preferred hobbies. Now we have a textbook quiet loner, whose horrific crimes might be connected to his gambling habit. Perhaps.
The Twittersphere jumped on this hypocrisy almost immediately, pointing out that Muslim attackers never get this kind of treatment.
white privilege is committing the largest shooting in American history and being fondly memorialized as a country music fan http://pic.twitter.com/RQpTsc63jn
— Ace (@MillennialShep) October 2, 2017
The Washington Post wasn’t the only outlet to go easy on Paddock, despite the unquestionable evidence of his guilt. In a move seemingly intended to do nothing but aggravate, get clicks, or both, TMZ ran an article mere hours after the massacre claiming that Paddock “doesn’t fit the profile” of a terrorist.
Mass shooter profile: commit a mass shooting.
— Jenn M. Jackson (@JennMJack) October 2, 2017
Shooter: Commits mass shooting.
Us: He fits the profile of a mass shooter.
TMZ: https://t.co/MdqAx5n751
Outlets like the Washington Post and TMZ, while vastly different, have an enormous readership and make a significant impact on the way Americans process breaking news. We need and deserve more honesty and clarity than what they gave us on Monday.
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