News, Media, and People: Where is the Outrage?

Bo Brusco | August 15, 2020

"if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention" by Tim Pierce is licensed under CC BY 2.0

With the tragic murder of a 5-year-old boy, Cannon Hinnant, many have been asking why there doesn’t appear to be a media campaign seeking justice for this crime? Others are wondering why the mainstream media are refusing to cover this story?

Why is no one demanding justice? 

To answer the first question, though the story is absolutely devastating, Hinnant’s killer, 25-year-old Darius Sessoms, was arrested as soon as the police could apprehend him. In an official statement, the Wilson Police Department said that “Sessoms has been charged with 1st Degree Murder and received no bond.” Justice, then, has been served as this killer is being held accountable for his crime and will be punished to the fullest extent of the law. 

In other instances, such as the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain, there were, and will likely continue to be, demands for justice posted across social media platforms because their killers were not held accountable for their crimes. We could reason then that if everyone knew who Sessoms was and what he had done, but refused to hold him accountable for taking the life of a 5-year-old boy, there would most definitely be demands for justice—or what some have been referring to as “media outrage.”

This is why the reactions to these deaths are different because some murderers have been punished for their crimes while others have not, making justice the varying factor. The legal definition of justice is “a scheme or system of law in which every person receives his/her/its due from the system, including all rights, both natural and legal.” This is the type of justice that has been served in Hinnant’s case. Arguably, this same justice was not (or has yet to be) served in the cases of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain.

Why won’t the mainstream media cover this story?

This brings us to the second question: How come this hasn’t received national media attention? Aside from the important factor previously and briefly mentioned, this question potentially demonstrates a lack of understanding of how the news works. 

How the News Works

The news is not some omniscient entity that can instantaneously report all egregious happenings nor determine exactly which issues will be the most important to us. It starts on the ground, even for national news corporations. Though they’re getting a bad rap these days, local journalist’s stories account for 43% of all original reporting, which means that a significant portion of the news being broadcasted by these big corporations is sourced from local stations. It’s understandable then that it may take some time for a story to receive national coverage, especially considering local journalists have to first investigate, draft and edit before they can even publish their stories (not to mention legal complications they may encounter depending on the nature of the subject).

In Hinnant’s case, he was murdered on the 8th of August, the next day local North Carolina news reported that Sessoms had been arrested. By the 12th, multiple local news stations had shared the story, and then USA Today published the news on the 13th. So it took a total of 5 days for Hinnant’s murder to make national headlines; however, there is a chance that many of us had already heard about the incident by then—which explains why we saw people accusing the mainstream media of not caring about the story.

Our High-Speed Advantage

A high-speed horse that has entered this race is social media, and if a story reaches Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube before it makes national news it will always outrun the mainstream media. A good example of this is George Floyd’s death. Floyd died on the 25th of May this year and it is likely possible that multitudes of people knew about it by the end of that same day because of the video footage uploaded to YouTube. With smartphone cameras, not only are we able to upload video after recording it, but we can also Livestream directly to different platforms—completely eradicating any gap time. 

This leg up we civilians have over news stations again explains why so many of us knew about Hinnant’s death before the likes of CNN or USA Today had a chance to cover it. Similarly, in the case of George Floyd, nationwide news outlets didn’t publish anything about his death until two days later, even though there had been several publicly available video recordings of the incident. So in that interim, is it fair to claim that the mainstream media doesn’t care about an issue or an incident?

The Media or the People?

Though we usually examine the media’s influence on the public, it is also important to note how we influence the media. To a certain degree, we are the media—which is evident in our social media behavior. For example, the collective assortment of folks demanding to know where the outrage for Hinnant’s murder is on social media inadvertently created the outrage themselves. After all, outrage is an extremely strong reaction of anger, shock, or indignation—a quality that was explicit in their posts, and they were demonstrating this outrage on social media platforms (media meaning a source of mass communication). 

So at the end of the day, we created the media outrage we were demanding to see, and it is not difficult to observe how our outrage directs the attention of mainstream news outlets. In this case, would Hinnant’s murder have received national attention if it weren’t for people’s posts about it on social media? Would it still have received national coverage eventually? Would it still have appeared in Twitter’s “News” tab if it weren’t for the efforts of the people to raise awareness?

Consider This

One thing we have learned from the aforementioned deaths is that if there is a crime going unpunished or an issue going unnoticed, people will raise awareness on whatever platform they can. Sometimes our efforts are censored (a topic which deserves more discussion), or unsubstantiated, or deemed less important than other pressing matters, but sometimes those efforts lead to national news corporations running with the story. Though this train of thought can lead to a “chicken or the egg” debate, it is clear that to some degree or another, the people influence the media because to some degree or another, we are media. 

Our ability to outrun the traditional sources of news and create the media we want to see should be practiced with caution. Will our fast-paced storytelling outrun the facts? Will our impulse to act outrun our reason? And will we notice our error when we’ve categorized all this information into a binary us vs. them/good vs. evil paradigm instead of seeing the world—and everyone and every situation in it—as the nuanced reality that it is? Additionally, will we become obsessed with superficial debates about which issue is most important in an attempt to win the moral high ground instead of focusing our energy on the issues themselves?