CBS News hopes ATL spa shooter is racist, makes up facts to make him one
- CBS News prematurely connects shooting in Atlanta to racism
- Liberal media displays its propaganda style of journalism
- We lack the evidence from the shooting in Atlanta to know the motivation behind the crime
- CBS News Article prematurely connects shooting to Asian American racism
Indicted Outlet: Li Cohen, April Siese | CBS News | Link | Archive
OUR RATING: Journalistic Malpractice. Even Salon.com is ashamed.
In the recent weeks, liberal outlets have decried the anti-Asian racism that has swept across America.
On Tuesday, March 16, eight people were shot and killed at three Atlanta-area spas, and another man was wounded. [1] While this was a tragedy because of the loss of human life, CBS news took no time in connecting the story to anti-Asian racism because six of the eight people killed were of Asian descent. This news story represents everything that is wrong about the media, filled with false connections, lying headlines, premature conclusions and a clear lack of evidence, the story propagates a total lie.
Major Violations:
- Premature Conclusions
- Creating False Connections
- Opinion as Fact
- Missing Context
- Unbalanced
- Lying Headline
The story’s primary sin is to make conclusions unsupported by facts about the nature of the shooting without the hard evidence necessary to make a claim about racism. This reveals a lack of journalistic rigor within CBS. The suspect, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, committed these acts at Young’s Asian Massage in Cherokee County and two Atlanta businesses, Gold Spa and Aromatherapy Spa. What the reporters do not at all investigate further is the claim made by Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office:
“This is still early, but he does claim that it was not racially motivated,” said Baker. “He does have an issue, what he considers a sex addiction, and sees these locations as something that allows him to go to these places, and it’s a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.”
Reports show that the suspect had attended rehab for his sex addiction. Someone who had lived in the same halfway house said that Long “felt an overwhelming sense of guilt over visiting massage parlors ‘for explicitly sexual activity.’” [2] Furthermore, two of Long’s housemates said “they never heard Long use racist language and had no knowledge that he ever visited racist message boards online.” [3] This seems like something the reporters would have looked into, but they did not. Instead, they claim racism at the first possible opportunity.
What these reporters should have asked was, whether the shooter specifically singled-out certain races for execution. How many potential victims did he have access to, and was he at all selective? Did he merely shoot everyone he ran across? There are basic facts about the layout of the facilities, where the victims were found and in what order they were murdered, that would give some indication as to whether his motive was race, sexual frustration, mental illness, or some other explanation, if any.
Some of the wordplay ongoing between politicians and their enablers in the media like Li Cohen and April Siese, is that they equate “hate” with “racism” with anything to do with race. So if there is a racial component to a story, it must necessarily involve “hate” and therefore, “racism.” Of course a murderer has ‘hate’ but it is unclear whether that hate was motivated by racial animus, or, instead, by more odd explanations that might suggest a mental illness. It’s simply too early to tell because there is no evidence available, but in the absence of evidence journalists should not just connect the dots that don’t exist and then bury the story later if they get it wrong.
A week later there was another mass shooting in Colorado at a grocery store known as King Soopers in Boulder. The media, again, raced to racialize the incident and declared that another ‘white man’ had killed 10 people in that location. Soon, when the facts began to emerge that the alleged shooter was a Syrian immigrant from 2002 with possible serious mental issues, the supposed ‘whiteness’ of the original shooter was buried by media outlets and media elites. [4][5][6]
There is a very specific media pathology on display here, which has been going on for many years, that seeks to put immediate public blame and shame on white men for violence and when that desired narrative does not fit, the story is buried. You can sense how excited the media is when they get the opportunity to report on such stories, and how visibly disappointed they are when shooters end up being the wrong racial background to sustain their desired narratives.
The CBS News article also cites a study, that has already been debunked by the Gateway Pundit, that hate crimes against Asian Americans surged roughly 150% in 2020 to prove that this shooting is just one of the many hate crimes being perpetrated against Asians. [7][8] So, the one piece of “hard” evidence CBS can come up with is one study that is misleading and states opinion as fact in its findings. CBS makes the same error by using the study to create a general belief in anti-Asian racism, then use this particular situation to reinforce belief. Propaganda at its finest.
The story’s “sources” also reinforce the foregone conclusions of the crime. The writer’s sources are Stop AAPI Hate, vice president Kamala Harris, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, New Jersey Democrat Andy Kim, as well as the sanctimonious tweets of celebrities and politicians, who all agree that this was violence directed specifically at the Asian community. Journalists have a responsibility to ensure that their sources are correct in their information, otherwise anyone could claim anything in a news article, so long as a source said it. However, these two particular journalists do not hold themselves to this standard, nor do they present a balanced spread of explanations for the shooting. Their sources are clearly biased and predisposed to think this particular event is part of a larger trend of racism.
We will end with the headline, which incorporates both the premature conclusions and bias evident in the article. The headline is this: “An unspeakable tragedy”: Asian American community reacts to deadly spa shootings in Georgia.” As already shown above, connecting the shooting to anti-Asian racism is premature and lacks evidence, but this doesn’t stop CBS from implicitly claiming a connection by writing a headline that connects the Asian American community to the shooting.
OUR RATING: Journalistic Malpractice. Even Salon.com is ashamed.
Bibliography:
1 ] https://news.yahoo.com/atlanta-spa-shootings-victims-202657168.html
2 ] https://www.foxnews.com/us/atlanta-shooting-suspect-robert-long-rehab-sex-addiction-former-roommates
3 ] Ibid.
4 ] https://nypost.com/2021/03/23/kamala-harris-niece-slammed-for-presuming-boulder-shooter-was-white/
5 ] https://www.christianpost.com/news/twitter-says-labeling-boulder-shooter-white-christian-is-ok.html
7 ] https://www.csusb.edu/sites/default/files/FACT%20SHEET-%20Anti-Asian%20Hate%202020%203.2.21.pdf
8 ] https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/23/the-latest-left-wing-anti-american-lie-anti-asian-racism/
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