Less than 12 hours after the news of the Las Vegas shooting broke, the sheriff in charge of investigating it described the gunman as a “lone wolf.”
In short order, that terminology was denounced as a proxy for white privilege.
Shaun King writing for The Intercept, said that the language perpetuates a double standard: when the mass murderer is identified as white, he is seen as an individual (and called a lone wolf); when the killer is black or Muslim, the entire race or religion bears the blame. The sentiment echoed across social media as well.
news: someone did a violent thing
me: Lord I hope they weren’t black
news: shooter was a lone wolf
me: oh so they were white
— Brokey S. Pumpkins (@brokeymcpoverty) October 2, 2017
Are there ingrained racial biases that surface when TV news outlets report these tragedies? Is this double standard persistent, or merely anecdotal?
Keen to answer these questions, Quartz reviewed the language used to describe the killers of 27 mass shootings in the US, beginning with the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012.
The media’s language about killers in mass shootings analyzed — Quartz