Why the Media Refuses to Call the White Supremacists Who Shot Black Lives
Matter Protesters 'Terrorists'
By Scott Timberg [1]
Salon [2], November 25, 2015
http://www.alternet.org/print/media/why-media-refuses-call-white-supremacists-who-shot-black-lives-matter-protesters-terrorists
The script has gotten familiar by now: Ideologically driven Muslim or
foreigner does something violent and awful, and they are dubbed a terrorist.
Ideologically driven white person does something violent and awful, and the
term rarely comes up.
That’s the way the latest act of public violence--the shooting [3], by white
supremacists, of five Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis last
night--has worked out. Black Lives Matter Minneapolis has called [4] this an
act of "domestic terrorism." But it’s harder to find in the news media. What
does the term "terrorism" mean in the lingua franca?
We spoke to media critic Todd Gitlin, a professor at Columbia University and
longtime writer on the counterculture, about the phenomenon.
Scott Timberg: Another shooting--white supremacist this time. Why are
we--the news media, at least--not widely describing them as terrorists?
Todd Gitlin: You should ask them! But I can surmise--they have "terrorist"
located as a compressed way to say Islamist-jihadist-enemy of America. If
they know that there have ever been any other kinds of terrorists in
America, that knowledge has gone down the memory hole.
I’ve been reading and writing on the Deep South in the early ‘60s, when
black activists and others were pretty regularly being shot to death and
burned to death and beaten up and abused in all kinds of ways. And my
recollection is that even then the word "terrorist" was not ordinarily used.
Look at the bombing of the church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 and see if
the word "terrorist" was applied. My guess is not very much. The term
"terrorist" came forward to refer to the Weather Underground and people like
that.
SCOTT TIMBERD: It wasn’t just an ethnic distinction, then.
TODD GITLIN: No, I think it was reserved for the left, then. A terrorist is
someone who used terror as a political instrument. Certainly the shooters in
Minneapolis would seem to qualify. [Timothy] McVeigh and [John] Nichols were
not trying to terrify so much as they were trying to destroy the state. I’m
not sure of that. There are times when the gang-banging militias would
qualify as terrorists in a strict sense: They see the violence as a platform
for their spiel... I think the Unabomber would qualify as a terroriScott
Timberd: He had a manifesto ready. Certainly some of the right-wing and
racist groups would qualify by any strict definition as terrorists. And the
news media haven’t coded them that way. There is a fixation about the
terrorists of Islamist inspiration, and that was probably already true
before Sept. 11, 2001. What do the racists in Minneapolis want to do? One
thing they seem to want to do is terrify the Black Lives Matter movement and
drive them off the stage.
SCOTT TIMBERD: Has technology changed things?
TODD GITLIN: It’s certainly easier in the age of Internet and social media
to use images of the destruction as mechanisms to incite fear and recruit
terrorists.
SCOTT TIMBERD: What are the consequences of this unconscious semantic
decision we’ve made? For people who aren’t media scholars or in the news
media, they see that when people on the left do something bad, they’re
terrorists. When people of Middle Eastern descent, or radical Islamists, do
something bad, it’s terrorism. When people on the right do something
dangerous or insane, it’s either a crime involving a "shooter" or a
"gunman"... What does this do to people watching?
TODD GITLIN: It helps this practice of confinement of the term terrorism...
It reinforces the idea that white American racism with violent equipment is
somehow not exactly normal, but doesn’t need to be taken seriously as a
social and political atrocity. It’s attributed to madmen. I think that’s a
fairly common right-wing trope. Like that guy [Jared Loughner] who shot
those people in Arizona, including the congresswoman... The right-wing
framing of him is that he was just a nut. The point of the distinction is to
leave undisturbed the presumption that people who resort to violence are
left-wing or Arab or both.
Scott Timberg is a staff writer for Salon, focusing on culture. A longtime
arts reporter in Los Angeles who has contributed to the New York Times, he
runs the blog Culture Crash. [5]He's the author of the new book, "Culture
Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class."
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mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Why the Media Refuses to
Call the White Supremacists Who Shot Black Lives Matter Protesters
'Terrorists' [6]
[7]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/media/why-media-refuses-call-white-supremacists-who-shot-black-lives-matter-protesters-terrorists
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/scott-timberg
[2] http://www.salon.com
[3]
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/11/24/457214142/5-people-are-shot-at-site-of-black-lives-matter-protest-in-minneapolis?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2050
[4]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/24/five-people-shot-near-minneapolis-protest-cops-searching-for-3-white-male-suspects/
[5] http://www.artsjournal.com/culturecrash/
[6] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Why the Media Refuses to
Call the White Supremacists Who Shot Black Lives Matter Protesters
'Terrorists'
[7] http://www.alternet.org/
[8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
