In the Empire State Building incident last week, two people were killed and nine were wounded. The two people killed were the murderer and his intended target, and the nine wounded were innocent bystanders. As the facts of the events were sorted, it turns out that the murderer only shot his intended target, and that the nine innocent bystanders were shot by police who took down the murderer. Now I am not angry at how the events played out. I am not angry at the police for how they handled the situation either. The man did have a gun after all, and police do need to defend themselves. It's unfortunate that nine people were injured solely by police defending themselves, but I am positive that the officers didn't intentionally shoot those that were wounded.
No, what really angers me is the media coverage of the event. I was online when the stories were being posted. Some labeled it as a shooting, and some were posting it as 'terror' probably trying to grab their audience's attention. Not surprising. However, many media outlets were quick to label the event as a mass shooting. After Aurora, CO and the shooting at the Sikh temple, the mainstream media was ready to jump on this, and so were many gullible gun-control advocates.
And here is the problem: it wasn't a mass shooting. There was only one victim of the shooter in this case, and as stated above, the rest of the wounded were victims of police fired rounds intended to take down the murderer. According to a witness, the BBC posted that the murderer was shooting indiscriminately at people, which is absolutely false. Some media outlets even published that the nine bystanders were injured in a 'gun battle'. In actuality, there was no gun battle as the murderer was taken down pretty quickly by police.
Whatever happened to the phrase 'just the facts' because apparently our media doesn't believe in this any longer? And when are we going to hold our media outlets accountable for their atrocious journalistic standards?
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