‘The Feed’ Is Taking The Australian Media To Task For Its Christchurch Terrorist Attack Coverage

The coverage of the Christchurch shooting by Australia’s leading right-wing media outlets has represented a unique break in their usual modus operandi.

In the past, conservative papers have tended to call on Imams to accept responsibility for acts of terror, and have described spree killers as unthinking murders. But in response to Christchurch, pundits have instead painted the shooting’s perpetrator as a one-time “curly-haired”, chubby and “working class” boy corrupted by violent video games.

Now, The Feed has tackled that very double standard, a bias in the media that has led to the Christchurch shooter being described as an angel and the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooter as an “ISIS devil.”

When a terrorist is brown its ‘us vs them.’ When they’re white, it’s just us! No them. So we must humanise the killer if we’re to contend with who we are as a society. My latest #Frant on the humanity afforded to whiteness #Christchurch massacre. #auposl pic.twitter.com/8kgHJP93FT

— Jan Fran (@Jan__Fran) March 18, 2019

“Imagine being a Muslim and waking up to a headline that describes the person who’s just killed 50 of your fellow Muslims as ‘angelic boy who grew into an evil far-right mass killer,” the video begins.

From there, Fran goes on to tear apart some of the more misguided conservative headlines and angles, including a profile of the killer that focuses on his father’s death from cancer, before delivering a scorching final thesis.

“I’m not saying don’t go into his background,” Fran says. “Of course we want to know who he is and where he came from. But I do question whether his working-class roots should be front and centre the morning after he’s murdered 50 people.

“I don’t know, maybe it’s weird for the Murdoch press to go hard on just how much this man despised Muslims given they’ve been low-key fanning that sentiment for years.

“It’s easy for us to say that Muslims come from an inferior culture, a violent religion, a broken society, that they’re full of hate. But we can’t quite say that about the white ones, because to do so would be to say we’re just the same.”