The Evil Media

exerpt:

The point is that nowhere in this sensationalist piece of front-page ultra-hype is there any context to explain that even if Pickton honestly believed himself to be on some kind of mission from the God of the Bible, that this was obviously misguided, wrong, and completely counter to anything that could be considered a legitimate expression of the Christian religion. Instead, the front page of the paper deliberately created a visual inference of "guilt by association"; it left the impression that all Christians are potential mass murderers because they share at least a tertiary allegiance to the same Book that Pickton cited in reference to getting folks to give up their "evil ways".

Perhaps 20 or 30 years ago, there was enough residual Christian influence in our society that the average reader would intuitively understand and know that the connections that were so implicitly made on that front page were spurious. But I fear that isn't the case anymore.

And the other question, of course, is whether this kind of reporting would have happened if the "first real insight into what motivated the mass murderer" had been a series of quotations from the Koran. One suspects the issue would have been treated much differently. If it had been covered at all, there would have been the obligatory qualifications from some Muslim cleric or other that "the Koran does not justify this kind behaviour", and about how Islam is the "religion of peace".

But in reality, I suspect the issue wouldn't even have come up.

Don't believe me? Consider this. Every December 6th, Canadians are called to bring to mind the memory of the man who killed more than a dozen women at Montreal's "Ecole Polytechnique". You know him as Marc Lepine. I bet you didn't know, though, that his birth name was Gamil Gharbi. Or that his father was an Algerian Muslim and that his mother was a badly-abused woman who finally screwed up the courage to divorce her abuser-husband. And that in the divorce papers, there was an affidavit indicating that the man "had a total disdain for women and believed they were intended only to serve men." And that the elder Gharbi apparently considered women to be "chattels" - possessions. This, then, was the environment young Gamil Gharbi grew up in. When he turned 18, he changed his name. Gamil became Marc. And Lepine was his mother's maiden name.

Might his upbringing have been relevant to what happened in that Montreal school? I would think these facts might actually be more germane to that case than the deranged Biblical quotes of a mass murderer that were splashed across the front page of a major newspaper on Monday were to the deaths of the women he's convicted of killing.

But did you know about Lepine's boyhood identity? Unless you're an avid student of the Montreal massacre, you probably didn't. And that's because there's a double standard at play in media coverage of these kinds of things; a double standard that is both offensive and dishonest.