Three young Muslims were shot dead in North Carolina and for some hours the US media did not blink. The local paper covered the triple shootings by a neighbor but none of the major networks and none of the nation's leading newspapers ran with the story. This was extremely odd given the probability that this was a hate-filled race crime. Deah Barakat, his wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha had been executed in their home in Chapel Hill with shots to the head. Any such ruthless murder of anyone in the US would normally have attracted considerable news coverage. The fact that the victims were Muslims ought to have added to the media's interest. Yet for several hours, there was nothing. Then something very interesting happened. Social media picked up on the local coverage of the crime. Within a couple of hours, posts about the slayings had gone viral, most obviously in the Muslim world. The Internet messages seemed to acquire the greater impetus because of the silence with which mainstream US news media had greeted news of the murders. Inevitably this changed. American newsrooms woke up to the tidal wave of social media messages and got with the program. The coverage became wall-to-wall. Journalists who had now flocked to North Carolina reported that the bull-necked triggerman, Craig Hicks, who had handed himself into police after committing the crime, had mental health issues. It appears that the origin of the confrontation was a parking dispute. In seeking to defend her husband, the wife said that this was not a racist killing. Hicks, she said had had disputes over parking with many neighbors. That being the case, the big question that US media ought to be asking is why, of all his neighbors, Hicks chose three decent young Muslims on whom to take out his murderous anger. Of equal importance has to be the issue of why it took social media coverage to wake up US news editors to a story that was clearly important in terms of Islamophobia and race hate. There is, of course, a herd mentality to journalism. If one or two news organizations pick up a story, the rest will follow. But it is spotting the story in the first place - a newsroom process known traditionally as “copy tasting” - that is the key. Clearly nobody looking at the local reports from North Carolina thought that the murder of three young Muslims was that important. In the hurly-burly of news gathering, this lapse of judgement will quickly pass. But it has to be asked what the coverage would have been had the Chapel Hill victims not been three Muslims, but three Jews. The US media has a pre-programed response for anti-Semitism. The coverage would probably have been a great deal faster, if not indeed instant and the parking dispute explanation examined far more critically.
The brutal fact is that three Muslims were executed in America with the same merciless efficiency as the so-called Islamic State shoots captured soldiers in Iraq and Syria. But until it found that it had to, it very much looks as if the great US media-machine simply did not care. Unfortunately for America and its news outlets, Muslims around the world have watched this colossal failure of journalistic duty and care about it very much.
