The Nashville school shooting brings out the worst in our media

The ugliness of the American media is on full show in the aftermath of a tragic mass shooting at a Nashville Presbyterian school, which left three staffers, including the head of the school, and three children, all nine years old, dead. Police identified Audrey Hale, a twenty-eight-year-old woman and alleged former student, as the shooter. Late yesterday, police chief John Drake confirmed that the biological female identified as a trans male.  

Almost immediately, several media outlets gestured at what they consider possible motives: Tennessee’s conservative crackdown on sexualized drag shows in front of minors — and the banning of permanent surgeries and hormone treatment for minors in the state, a policy that is under consideration in several other red states. It was almost as if the “actual” victims were not the six people killed by a mass murderer in a school, but the trans community being targeted by Tennessee lawmakers. The shooting also came just days before a “Trans Day of Vengeance” rally in Washington, DC. Newsweek wrote “drag shows and gender-affirming care for minors were banned in Tennessee this month, while assault weapons remain legal.” Sure they weren’t blaming the policies of the state for the decisions and delusions of the shooter?  

ABC’s Terry Moran noted the passage of Tennessee’s legislation during his live report, as a possible and thus far speculative motive. New York Times and NBC News contributor Benjamin Ryan, in a since deleted tweet, noted that Nashville “is home to the Daily Wire, a hub of anti-trans activity by @MattWalshBlog, @BenShapiro and @MichaelJKnowles.”  

Several other outlets, including NPR, the New York Times and USA Today took time to correct Nashville law enforcement for previously misgendering the mass shooter and not using “his” desired pronouns. Prior to the confirmation of the shooter’s identity, the Washington Post, also in a since deleted tweet, wrote “GOP congressman from Nashville district ‘heartbroken’ by shooting. A 2021 photo shows his family with firearms.”  

This sorry display bears hallmarks of the reaction to the 2017 congressional baseball field shooting by James Hodgkinson, a Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer and avid MSNBC viewer. Shortly after that attack, host Joy Reid attempted to vilify House representative Steve Scalise as he was fighting for his life. “It’s a delicate thing because, obviously everybody is wishing the congressman well and hoping that he recovers. But Steve Scalise has a history that we’ve all been forced to sort of ignore on race.” The trope that coursed through the liberal media was that while the shooting was tragic, because of the politics of the people being shot at, they kind of deserved it. 

But the trans community is no more to blame for the shooting yesterday than the NRA is when a non-member commits a mass shooting — though of course that never stops journalists from linking that organization to the violence. The contents of Hale’s manifesto remain unknown to the public — but there are already demands from Republican politicians that the FBI and DHS investigate the targeting of a Christian institution as a hate crime. We don’t yet know what their investigation might turn up — and the role of identifying motive falls much more to law enforcement than it does to the media. For those commentators, so eager to cast around and ascribe blame to their political adversaries in the aftermath of tragedy, it would be a real shame if the actual investigations reveal that the myth of trans genocide played a part. When media figures claim that the political right is implementing policies akin to the Holocaust, that are “literally killing people,” then the mentally disturbed may consider themselves justified when they literally kill people, as occurred in Nashville. For the finger-pointing pundits, the blame-seeking could backfire. Perhaps in future, they’d be better off grieving, or at least pausing for thought, before trying to explain away the brutality.