Member-only story
RACISM
Why Portraying a Black Victim as The Suspect is Media Malpractice
This case of mistaken identity has racial connotations
To err is human,” the English poet Alexander Pope suggested in his 1711 Essay on Criticism. And yet, some errors are more egregious than others. For instance, after a shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia, WSB-TV, an Atlanta station, made a faux pas that reignited the national conversation about racial bias in media reporting. The outlet posted a link to a new article using a photo of Mason Schermerhorn, a 14-year-old Black victim of the shooting with the caption “suspect, Colt Gray, was arrested.” The Daily Mail made the same misstep, misidentifying the Black student killed in the attack with the alleged shooter. Spilling a glass of milk is not the same as portraying a homicide victim as the perpetrator. While the former only requires a mop to clean, the other has a messier consequence. Sadly, even though Mason became a victim of gun violence, many Americans saw his face for the first time, portrayed as the suspect of a horrendous crime, a school shooting he was a victim of.
Two students and two teachers were killed in the Georgia school shooting, and nine more suffered injuries. And yet, the irony isn’t lost on the black community that the only victim whose image was mistakenly paired with the suspect’s identity was Mason, the Black student. Why are Black people often seen as the perpetrators rather than the victims of crimes? Far too frequently, they are stereotyped as criminally deviant, and sadly, Black teenagers are no exception to that phenomenon (Trawalter et al., 2008). Americans often assume criminal suspects are Black (Smiley & Fakunle, 2016). While WSB-TV released an apology, claiming “one of the victims was unintentionally presented on X in a way that made it appear as if the victim was the shooter,” the media group fell short of taking accountability for the racial impact of their misstep.
Their colorblind atonement also failed to mention remorse for the potential effects on Mason’s family. This was a case of media malpractice, as they failed to review before publishing the story. Perhaps one takeaway is that updating a story published online with new details requires considering how those changes impact the…
