#7 Exploiting a News Story

 The Media Mishandling Coverage of Atlanta Shootings

    When it comes to exploitation, various things are utilized for one's personal gain to seek buzz and media. The act of exploiting or exploitation has a lot of many meanings but they all mean the same thing such as use (a situation or person) in an unfair or selfish way and benefit unfairly from the work of (someone), typically by overworking or underpaying them. Overall, taking advantage of someone's weakness or situation for a specific agenda. This tends to be the case in coverage of mass shootings. In the past, the media has played a huge role in exploiting tragedies in mass shootings for buzz and mayhem. It is not why they cover it, it is how they cover it. There is nothing wrong with covering a widespread event that has happened in today's society. It is the way it is portrayed and how the media can do a better job at displaying things that involve a tragedy. Think of the past and how the media has portrayed mass shootings to infringe a certain agenda. Take into account when the Parkland shooting happened and the media displayed heart-wrenching photos of the victims' families crying on national TV and some of the families didn't want to be interviewed. It was like the media was driven by getting a story out and being the first to cover something horrific that at any cost let the families grieve. In the Atlanta shootings case, there is a lot of misinformation and dismissal of racial bias during this tragedy. 

    Within the first few hours after the shootings, there was a noticeable difference between mainstream media news outlets and local Asian news outlets in their approach to covering the Atlanta mass shootings. Most visible was the lack of community-driven and critical reporting from the mainstream media, even by big publications with the resources to deploy reporters on the ground (Nieman Lab). Upon  hearing the shootings, the mainstream media has yet to cover that 6 of 8 victims were Asian ancestry and relied more so on the police force statements to provide what happened. Thing that the mainstream media did when handling coverage of Atlanta shootings was trying to downplay the suspects intentions of the crime.

     Major news sources such as Washington Post and New York Times disclosed that the assailant motive had nothing to do with race. The predominant media narrative cast doubt on racist intent behind the mass shootings — despite the facts that the businesses attacked were Asian-owned, the majority of victims were of Asian descent, and the shootings took place amid an uptick in anti-Asian hate crimes across the country (Nieman Lab).By comparison, reports from Korean news outlets centered on interviewing locals, community leaders, and government entities like the Korean Consulate in the immediate aftermath of the shootings. The Korea Daily learned the Korean victims’ ages by speaking with people from nearby stores, and the Korea Times Atlanta cited a witness account that alleged the shooter had yelled “I’ll kill all the Asians” before the attack. Jeong Park, a reporter for The Sacramento Bee, began compiling a thread on Twitter with news reports by Asian news outlets in Atlanta. He noticed a difference in reporting right away.“ The first thing that’s very noticeable is who they’re choosing to quote,” said Park, who started the thread to follow how Atlanta’s Korean-American community was responding to the mass tragedy. “We saw [Korean media] very early on quote the eyewitnesses, having them and their words drive the discussion versus the mainstream media, which early on relied heavily on law enforcement" (Nieman Lab). 

    Also how the media contribute to mishandling coverage is the way they silenced Asian lives with no background of who exactly were the victims. Little to no one officially knew the names or who they were as people was showcased across the news reports. Media just tried to get across an eye-catching headline story without developing all the details first. Partly could be due to how mainstream media perceived the shootings vs Asian news outlets. Instead of the mainstream media reaching out to Asian news outlets to better understand the language barrier between witnesses and how the shooting occurs they based their facts solely based on the law enforcement officials. Whether it was a language barrier or not, it leaves no excuse for the media to mishandle coverage dealing with shooting of people of Asian descent. Overall, news sources from the media need to do a better job at taking part in leading a news story dealing with tragedy.