In the past three weeks, two small communities in two Dairy Belt states have seen tragedy — and, of course, two very different media reactions.
In Oxford, Michigan, Ethan Crumbley, a fifteen-year-old student, opened fire with a handgun at his high school on Tuesday. He killed four students and wounded eight and was taken into custody. After a brief search, both of Crumbley’s parents were arrested on manslaughter charges, for purchasing the firearm and gifting it to him. Ethan Crumbley has been charged with twenty-four different felonies including terrorism.
Shortly before the shooting, a teacher identified disturbing signals in classroom, including his drawings depicting suicide, mass death, blood and firearms. She alerted the administration, who called in Crumbley and his parents. Crumbley’s parents were instructed to remove their son from school on the day of the shooting. They did not do so, and Crumbley returned to carry out the shooting.
Some media outlets, including the Daily Beast, made a point of highlighting Crumbley’s mother’s pro-Trump views and Facebook posts, but that was the only political connection that could be made. As of now it does not appear Ethan Crumbley acted out of racial hatred or animus. This is likely the reason that the Oxford shooting is not receiving the lead-off segment or front-page story treatment from the national media.
In Waukesha, Wisconsin, a thirty-nine-year-old man named Darrell Brooks killed six and wounded dozens more when he drove his SUV through a Christmas parade, swerving, according to prosecutors, in order to inflict as much damage as possible. Brooks was released on $1,000 bail five days before attacking the parade. It’s notable that coverage of this attack shortly disappeared from national news coverage. The New York Times has yet to run any stories about Waukesha and its fallout this month, even as victims are returning home from the hospital.
There is a clear double standard at play in how Brooks has been depicted in the media. His attack came shortly after the verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial across the state in Kenosha. Several commentators — even in the White House — had broadly declared Rittenhouse a white supremacist. As Kyle Rittenhouse’s social media accounts came under heavy scrutiny by a media eager to convict him, Brooks’s social media accounts, and threats he made on them, including the sharing of pro-Hitler content, have all been memory-holed. As of now, there is no proof that racial motivation played a role in either the Rittenhouse case or the Waukesha attack. This is very inconvenient to our national media, whose business model depends on identifying a woke racial angle in every story.
The main feature that the Waukesha attack and the Oxford shooting have in common is failure at the administrative level. It’s inconvenient for the media to acknowledge the role bail reform played in the Waukesha attack, as it led to a mentally ill career criminal being released. And while teachers were quick to act in Oxford, there should have been direct intervention at the administrative level with Ethan Crumbley. That should have included him being counseled that day, escorted off campus, or detained by the school resource office, who is a direct representative of the Sheriff’s office.
But our media isn’t interested in stories about system failures. They only seek to address tragedies that have a racial or political aspect. Sadly, the lessons that should be learned from Oxford and Waukesha will likely be ignored and forgotten, and calamities like them will happen again.
