How the media covered the mass shooting in Georgia — Poynter

The news was horrific. A 21-year-old white man went on a rampage Tuesday in and around Atlanta, shooting and killing eight people, many of them women of Asian descent.

Most news organizations tried to walk a fine line in their reporting even though details were still cloudy more than 24 hours after the shootings. The most complicated part of this story was the shooter’s motivation.

The New York Times responsibly covered this topic by writing, “The brazen shootings, which took the lives of six women of Asian descent, stirred considerable outrage and fear in the Asian-American community. Investigators said they had not ruled out bias as a motivating factor even as the suspect denied such racial animus once in custody.”

We likely will learn more in the coming days and weeks, but an important conversation arose from this nightmare: the fear that Asian Americans continue to feel.

The headline on Nicole Chavez’s story for CNN was “Asian Americans were already living in fear. The Atlanta-area spa killings feel like a terrifying escalation for them.”

Chavez wrote, “The shootings in the Atlanta area left the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community across the country in mourning and feeling that it was a devastating escalation to the…