Framing Mass Murder
An examination of the choices journalists make, and how those choices effect the narrative.
Last week, NPR put out a piece by Odette Yousef on the Highland Park shooter entitled, “Why the Highland Park suspect represents a different kind of violent extremism.” The headline, likely written by an NPR editor, caught my eye. How was Bobby Crimo III, a disaffected young man angry at his place in the world, different from Dylann Roof or Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold or Elliot Rodger or Salvador Ramos? To me, they all represent the mass shooter pattern: thinking of yourself as exceptional and misunderstood, channeling that into hatred of women, bonding with other young men to share and support that disaffection.
As I read the piece I realized this was a story that should have either died or been better developed in the pitch session.
But it’s a really good lesson on supposition and framing - how the journalist decides to tell the story, who she talks to, and, more importantly, what part of the story she doesn’t tell.
Let’s look at some of the suppositions Yousef brings to this.
Supposition #1: “There is no clear political or ideological motivation”
This thesis comes at the end of her first paragraph. The next paragraph takes the turn that piqued my interest in the headline.
Rather than falling neatly into categories familiar to law enforcement and the public, such as white supremacists, radical Islamists or anti-government militants, it requires an understanding of dark, online subcultures that overlap and feed into each other in ways that glorify violence and foster nihilism.
These categories seem odd. While they may be “familiar,” Yousef does not establish they are predominant among mass shooters. A quick check finds that they aren’t.
According to The Violence Project, which keeps a database on mass shootings, “Mass shooters with hate group associations are a minority of perpetrators, but they’ve more than tripled since 2016.”
Which means shootings from “white supremacists, radical Islamists or antigovernment militants” are, in fact, the “different kind of violent extremism.” The Highland Park shooting followed the usual trend. Which means the entire premise of this NPR piece is backwards.
Tom Nichols called shooters like the one in Highland Park “The Lost Boys” in a seminal piece in 2015, after the Charleston Emanuel AME Church shooting:
“…the truth of the matter is that Dylann Roof… isn’t that different from so many other young, mostly white men over the past 30 years or so who have lashed out against their society in different ways.”
Nichols characterized the extent to which any of these shooters, like Roof, expressed white supremacist or anti-government ideology as simply something easy they could hang their hat on.
“In almost every case, they dress their anger in the clothes of ideology: white supremacy, jihad, hatred of abortion, or anti-government paranoia.”
This puts mass shooters directly into the rather nebulous category of disaffected, angry young men who are drawn to whatever angry ideology happens to be front and center.
Supposition #2: “This must be about terrorism”
You can tell a lot by a journalist’s framing from the sources they set out to talk to.
In this case, Yousef talked almost exclusively to “experts on extremism and technology.”
Not experts on mass shootings, but experts on extremism. Which is making a judgment that mass shooters are extremists and not a metastasized social cancer that affects society as a whole.
This is a method used often - and I believe subconsciously - among journalists to distance themselves from the horrible event they’re reporting on. We use it when we report people “succumbed to suicide” or blame suicide on “longterm depression” rather than a reaction to bullying or the world around them - and the prevalence of guns.
To do the latter would be to admit that it can happen to any of us. And that is a scary road to go down.
Supposition #3: “Its an aesthetic”
Much of Yousef’s piece is about how would-be shooters dress and pose and interact. The shooters, her experts say, “style themselves” after the Columbine shooters.
Yousef asserts that this aesthetic is primary over any ideology the shooters might have, that the visual elements of the online subculture are “designed to break your brain.”
I’m having a little trouble with this one. Is she really asserting that mass shooters are created by style choices? Or is she asserting that innocent people are being lured to be mass shooters by a cult-like online atmosphere?
The first possibility is absurd. The second takes away responsibility from the men who choose to kill people, and the societal forces that create these men.
The central question she didn’t ask: What draws them to these cult-like atmospheres?
Supposition #4: “There are no online subcultures among terrorists”
This brings us back to Yousef’s second paragraph, where she states her thesis. Here is that paragraph again:
“Rather than falling neatly into categories familiar to law enforcement and the public, such as white supremacists, radical Islamists or anti-government militants, it requires an understanding of dark, online subcultures that overlap and feed into each other in ways that glorify violence and foster nihilism.”
I’m sorry, white supremacists, radical Islamists and anti-government militants don’t have “online subcultures that overlap and feed into each other in ways that glorify violence and foster nihilism”?
Huh?
Then why were we all worried about young Muslim men being recruited by ISIS?
Aren’t most of the January 6 indictments based on online communities and communications from people who identified with the Proud Boys and/or the Oath Keepers? Didn’t Stephen Ayers testify to the January 6th Committee on July 12 that he was “pretty hardcore into the social media” and that’s why he believed the Big Lie and came to the Capitol?
Again, Yousef is making an easy distinction that defies accuracy. But she would have to ask deeper, more troubling questions to be accurate. And that would change the thrust of her entire piece.
There IS a Clear Ideology
Yousef uses the word “expert” in her piece eight times. She uses the word “aesthetic” five times. She never once uses the word “misogyny.”
She notes that most shooters are men. But she fails to take that next step, the one Nichols took in 2015, examining why men are so angry, and who their anger is directed at.
Last month, after the Uvalde shooting, criminologist Frank Robertz told the Washington Post that most mass shooters are not only young men, but have fantasies “of unlimited power and greatness” and an intense desire for admiration.
The Post also quoted “Peter Langman, a psychologist who researches school shootings, [who] noted in The Journal of Campus Behavioral Intervention that ‘the sense of damaged masculinity is common to many shooters and often involves failures and inadequacies.’”
The same story quoted Eric Madfis, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Washington at Tacoma, that shooters “are trying to regain control through a ‘masculine’ solution after a long period of frustration.”
Let’s not forget that the first mass shooting of the modern era was not Columbine, it was Jonesboro a year before. In Jonesboro, a 13-year-old boy, angry that a girl had rebuffed him, conspired with his 11-year-old friend to pull the fire alarm at their junior high school. As students and teachers poured out of the building, the boys were hiding on a hill beyond the school, with their rifles. They only fired at the girls. Four of them, and one female teacher, died.
Everytown for Gun Safety, the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, have all put out reports linking misogyny with gun violence in general, and mass shooting and extremism in particular.
There is, of course, an overlap between extremist terrorist groups and misogyny. Everytown’s report notes that right-wing groups that have risen since 2016 are finding misogyny “an effective initial outreach mechanism” - presumably to disaffected young men who do not fit into the white supremacist category.
THAT is what they have in common. Misogyny is their shared ideology. Violence and misogyny are inextricably linked.
But, misogyny is a side, and we don’t take sides
This is where much of the media, and NPR in particular, fails at talking about the reality of the world we live in. We, as journalists, cannot mention racism as a cause, unless the perpetrator yells the N-word or some other explicit racial epithet. We cannot cite misogyny unless the shooter has a manifesto in which he rails against women.
These are both elephants that we are so used to, we don’t even notice them taking up space in the room anymore.
The fact that 98 percent of mass shooters are men, and they fall into the categories of young, emasculated men or middle-aged men who fear emasculation is not something we can touch in stories. It is “taking a side.”
This is because much of what we define as “sides,” much of how we define ourselves as “objective,” is rooted in rules that were created in the early-mid 20th century, when men called colleagues “girl reporters” and ran them through a sexual harassment gauntlet that still survives. And how many of those male journalists had Black colleagues, or bothered to understand the racism of Jim Crow they were living through? Hell, 100 years ago, journalists were writing about the public spectacle of lynchings - which were an occasion for people to bring picnic baskets to the town square.
This idea that we can’t actually call out what’s happening is dangerous for journalism, and it’s dangerous for the country. How many people - good people, educated people - read Yousef’s piece and came away thinking that not only are mass shooters different today than they were two decades ago (which is not true), but they’re driven by performance, rather than the performance being driven by misogynist anger? As long as we ignore that anger - and its cause - then this will keep happening.
Well done. What do we call the fully armed 60 #Uvaldepolice waiting in the halls of Robb ES while children were screaming and the killer was still firing his AR into victims pretending to be dead? In real life, a rifle doesn’t give you courage and doesn’t make you masculine. But these mass shooters build themselves up for an event where they can be “masculine” To find courage they marinate in mysoginist postings and racial hatred babble. Don’t know how we get beyond ...
This is excellent, Carrie. There is a root to get to, and I believe you nailed it. ".....but they’re driven by performance, rather than the performance being driven by misogynist anger? As long as we ignore that anger - and its cause - then this will keep happening." Did you send this to Odette Yousef?