In defence of the media’s coverage of Stephen Paddock
“ He liked to bet big, wagering tens of thousands of dollars in a sitting. He owned homes in four states but preferred staying in casino hotels, sometimes for weeks at a time, as he worked the gambling machines.”
This is how The Washington Post introduced us to Stephen Paddock, the perpetrator of the deadliest single-shooter massacre in modern American history.
It didn’t go down well. Las Vegas shooter Paddock was afforded a degree of colourful characterisation — of humanity — that has been flatly denied to people with darker skin and less common names. Commentators were quick to point this out.
There is an all-too-common pattern of white criminals receiving the benefit of the doubt while even black victims are portrayed in the media as thugs or louts. This Huffington Post article from 2014 contains some prescient examples, and many, many more could be added from the past few years.
Sure, Brock Turner raped a defenceless woman, but he was such a great swimmer! Elliott Rodger published YouTube rants about his deep and sexualised hatred of women, but who could have guessed that this innocent-yet-frustrated college boy would turn violent?
The media have made grave errors when reporting on these cases. Serious harm has been done each time they’ve published a mugshot of a black person who’s been murdered by cops, while waxing lyrical on the skills and virtues of a white person who has committed terrible acts.
But I don’t think The Washington Post and other outlets have been wrong in this case. Here’s why.
It’s not wrong to humanise perpetrators, but we shouldn’t canonise them.
The Post article gave us a picture of Paddock’s existence as a retiree, as the son of an ex-fugitive, a gambler and a quiet, solitary, older man. He was never described as ‘kind’ or ‘gentle’ or any other subjective descriptor that could be taken as an excuse for his actions (or indeed, disproved by his actions).
I think if we’re to be honest with ourselves, we’re afraid to allow for the humanity of people like Paddock. Because if they can do these unspeakable things, maybe the guy down the street might do so too. Maybe our uncle might do it. Maybe we’ll do it ourselves.
It’s painful and scary to acknowledge that someone can be a music-lover and a murderer. We prefer our killers to be monsters: beings of a different fabric who we will never understand and we will never become.
Maybe we should seek to understand our villains.
Maybe by scrutinising the behaviour and circumstances of someone like Paddock, we can pick up red flags that we wouldn’t recognise otherwise (even in ourselves). Maybe by acknowledging that he was a seemingly normal guy who was capable of atrocities, we can recognise that the seemingly normal people in our lives might be similarly capable, and be that little bit more vigilant.
Maybe we can accept responsibility that we are human, and humans do some reprehensible things (for example: blocking gun control legislation). There’s a scale, and Paddock is an outlier on the far end of that scale, but we all need to make sure we don’t slide the wrong way across.
Was he a terrorist?
This is the other main criticism levelled against The Washington Post and its peers: that by and large, Paddock has not been labelled the T-word.
‘Terrorist’ is just about the worst thing you can be called in this day and age. It connotes a singularity of evil and cunning, of psychopathic indifference to the mass suffering of others. So I understand why people want to call Paddock a terrorist.
But consider this definition from the Oxford English Dictionary:
Terrorism: The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
So far we don’t know what Paddock’s aims were, least of all if they were political. ISIS have claimed responsibility, but they‘re not always the most truthful of murder cults.
If this was — as it initially appears to be — a senseless, aimless massacre, it is not terrorism. It’s true that we continue to define and redefine terrorism as a concept, and a one-sentence OED definition fails to capture the complexity of the matter. But a crime without a cause, without a flag to raise or a battle-cry to chant, is not terrorism. It’s old-fashioned, senseless violence — another thing us humans are very good at.
In summary: the media have done OK here. It’s in other cases they need to do better.
The next time a non-white man commits a crime or a Muslim person claims to represent ISIS, let’s delve into their stories too. Let’s try to find out what led them down that path and how we could have stopped them, or supported them to seek the help they needed.
This isn’t to say that violent criminals don’t deserve to be held responsible for their actions; far from it. But in most crimes, our culture is partly responsible too. It’s that culture that raised the criminal and created the conditions for them to wreak their destruction. (Again, can we PLEASE get some gun control in here?)
Let’s allow for a little complexity.
