Reporting Bias in Coverage of Student Killings
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By RANA F. SWEIS FEB. 13, 2015
AMMAN, Jordan — Whether three young students were shot and killed in North Carolina this week in a parking dispute or, as their families believe, because they were Muslims, online commentators here and outside the Middle East say the victims’ religion makes it a hate crime.
Failing to treat it as such, the commentators say on social media, indicates that Americans and the Western news media just do not understand the region.
Even before learning that two of the three victims — Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19 — were Jordanian citizens, their compatriots on social media called for wider coverage of the killings.
The shooting occurred Tuesday afternoon in Chapel Hill, N.C., but most news media outlets in the United States and abroad did not report on it until later the next day. This led some on social networks to suggest that the news media was slow to cover the story because the victims were Muslims.
Jordanians on social media added that the reluctance to report the story as a hate crime was evidence of Western bias.
The front page Friday of Al Ghad, an independent daily newspaper, read: “Two Jordanians victims of hate crime in the U.S.”
The police initially described the shooting as stemming from a parking dispute with a white middle-aged neighbor, Craig Stephen Hicks, who later turned himself in and was charged in the killings. Late on Thursday, the F.B.I. said it would look into whether the shooting was a hate crime.
Still, Mahmoud Shabeeb expressed his outrage on Twitter at what he perceived to be inconsistent standards when either the suspects or the victims of a crime were Muslim.
The satirical Jordanian website Kharabeesh posted angry expressions from across the Arab world, and included a translation of a Twitter message by the CNN political commentator Sally Kohn with a hashtag, in Arabic, “#Western_Media_Standards.”
A comment to the post by Kharabeesh alleged “hypocrisy, media that sees with one eye only.”
A cartoonist for Al Ghad, Naser Al-Jafari, posted on Facebook a cartoon of Mr. Hicks, the suspect, standing beside a militant of the Islamic State who is dressed in black with his face covered. It is titled, in English, “The Visible & Invisible Face of Terror.”
Another popular Jordanian cartoonist, Osama Hajjaj, posted on Twitter a menacing depiction of Mr. Hicks in the colors of the American flag — red hair and ears, white eyes and a blue nose. His black beard and mouth resemble an Islamic State militant dressed in black. Many social media posts attempted to liken Mr. Hicks, 46, a former auto parts dealer who had been studying to become a paralegal, with Islamic extremists accused of killing Americans.
Dr. Mohammad Yousif Abu-Salha, the father of the two slain women, also questioned the attention his daughter's killing had received in comparison with crimes committed by Muslims.
“If a Muslim commits a crime, it’s on the news 24/7 for two months,” Dr. Abu-Salha, a psychiatrist in Clayton, N.C., told The Associated Press. “When we are executed in numbers, it’s on the news for seconds.”
On Friday, Jordan’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling on all Jordanians in the United States to be cautious and on alert after the shooting.
Queen Rania of Jordan, using the popular hashtag #muslimlivesmatter, sent her condolences to the victims’ families to her 3.6 million followers on Twitter.
And Natasha Tynes, a Jordanian-American media consultant, wrote on Facebook, “I guess there is no ‘Je Suis’ hashtag for the three Muslims gunned down in Chapel Hill,” and wondered if world leaders would march in the streets to condemn the killings as they did after the attacks in Paris on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery store last month.
Some Jordanian social media activists have called for a rally in Amman on Saturday, declaring: “Charlie is not more valuable than them.”
Read in the NYTIMES
