CNN had a former SWAT commander from New Orleans helping to narrate reported events in Orlando. The gunman in Orlando is named Jorge Rodriguez. The coverage that I saw only showed the police spokeswoman giving the gunman's name and not his birthplace.
Major Hasan who shot people yesterday was born in Arlington, VA. according to Army information released yesterday.
The SWAT team "expert" theorized these two men born outside the country must have been upset due to broken immigrant dreams. He went on to speculate that the machismo of the men's cultural background might have provoked them to behave violently.
There are no native born Americans named Rodriguez or Hasan.
None.
Ask Lou Dobbs.
Jeezus.
These gunmen were both most likely born in the United States.
The disgruntled macho immigrants are not coming after us.
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I also braced myself for more violent incidents ... and unfortunately, it is happening already.
I'm not sure where our resident columbine expert is but if I recall correctly, there were a ton of shootings after the columbine murders because it was like every whackjob suddenly wanted the moment of shame.
the only words from rodriquez i saw on raw tv footage during the arrest were "they left me there to rot."
he was let go from the company whose 8th floor offices he shot up.
what does ethnicity have to do with it? probably not one hoot.
i'm surprised they haven't tried to bring the white house into it yet.
On SP's FB this morning, someone said that yesterday's shooting was the first terror attack on Obama's watch on American soil. Um, the poster cannot read? Hasan is an American guy.
"Expert" Jackass. Glad you posted this Dorinda.
Yet the poster left this nasty comment on how somehow I was "pushing" an agenda.
The point is that the wars we are fighting are making people even more paranoid and racist, if not religiously intolerant.
And the stress on our soldiers is driving them to do these acts of violence, along with the rising suicide rates.
Which is just one more reason for STOPPING THESE WARS NOW.
The fact that the media is deliberately hyping this racist and religious discriminatory crap is appalling.
I am really angry at Obama right now for perpetuating both wars, but one of the things that really made me furious last year during the run up to the election (and I voted for him) was all the fuss made about his middle name and the "fear" people have about Muslims.
We are a country founded on RELIGIOUS LIBERTY and tolerance. Supposedly.
Why is it that so many people forget that?
Jack Kennedy was also the first CATHOLIC president and that was a big deal too.
Unfortunately, it is my opinion that this backlash is also being hyped by the wars we are fighting and the deliberate scare tactics our political elites are using about "enemies" and "terrorists" constantly.
They seem to forget that Malcom X was a Muslim and that Joe Kennedy was virulently anti semitic. With appalling consequences for millions of European Jews.
I guess that's a fact conveniently forgotten, huh, when you're trying to whip up enthusiasm for two awful and wasteful wars.
Good post.
I then remembered a study that was done at the UCLA law school that documented the number of times a newscaster would refer to a suspected criminal's ethnicity if he were Black or Latino, versus a white male. The difference was crazy. They might say white male once or they might just say 6 feet, brown hair and green eyes and move on. But everyone else is described repeatedly in terms of race.
Then it dawned on me that the media was simply treating ethnicity for the purposes of their reporting on an Asian assailant the same way they treat any other minority--they were going to say Asian/Korean until they were blue in the face.
The only thing is, I wasn't used to hearing repeated references to someone's Asian ethnicity on the television like that before (I've been desensitized to hearing references to Blacks and Latinos because they are referred to so much, which is unfortunate.) I remember feeling very put off the morning of Virginia Tech however, even talking to the TV and saying "will you just get off it?"
So now we have two more minority assailants--and both from backgrounds that have fallen into public perception problems because of the race problem du jur, i.e. the "Middle East terrorists" problem and the the "illegal alien" problem. So they were bound to have hours of discussion conjecturing on how ethnicity was at play in the tragedies.
However, I do wonder if these early reporting gaffes--made before the facts are known and occurring during what I characterize as "filler" segments where an expert on SWAT TEAMs is asked to speculate on some universal immigrant propensity to want to kill Americans--are the result of some reflexive "need " (or rating requirement) to discuss race in relation to crime when the criminal is not white.
That is to say, the mistakes are made in a deadzone devoid of actual facts or real time developments that is taken up witch unsubstantiated and usually irrelevant "race talk."
The study I referred early was a criminology paper and did not purport to understand or take a position on why the media did this type of thing. It was a statistical count in support of a hypothesis re the disconnect between public perceptions of crime and the actual numbers.
So I don't know why this happens in general or why it happened here.
I do note, however, that it always happens early in the reporting and it always happens because the media can't leave race alone when it comes to reporting on crime.
As the errors get more egregious, however, maybe, just maybe, the news media will take a harder look at what they are misreporting and correct their procedure--even if they never bother to wonder why they were doing it in the first place.
-e