Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad, No Good Stories In the Paper That Make Readers Wonder if Reporters Have Lost Their Minds

The LA Times is at again. Yesterday it ran two stories on the front page of the California section claiming that President Trump's use of the words "China Virus" caused a young religiously conflicted incel by the name Robert Aaron Long to murder six Thai women in Atlanta and that this was the end result of a dangerous wave of anti-Asian hate sweeping the land. 

This is not straightforward reporting. The writer, Brittny Mejia, apparently wants so much to blame the Thai sex worker killings on Trump's use of the words China virus she acts as if there were no connection between China and the 500,000 deaths we have suffered here from the Wuhan virus. I don't doubt that Trump's use of the words China Virus did contribute to anti-Asian sentiment in this country. But I am also sure that Trump's words pale into insignificance as motivation for anti-Asian feeling when compared to the overwhelmingly more significant fact that China blithely let three-quarters of a million people travel to this country at a time when it knew it had a fatal, infectious virus spiraling out of Wuhan. The Chinese government quite reasonably banned flights from Wuhan to other parts of China but did not stop flights from Wuhan to the United States. That's why people here were furious with China.

Also notice how the Times reporter, Brittny Mejia, conflates Thai with Chinese by calling them both Asian. This way she doesn't have to address why Long would kill Thai workers if his real beef was with China.

Presidents, of course, need to be careful in their use of language, given how many nutcases are loose in the land. But I also suspect Trump's use of the words China Virus added perhaps one inch to an Everest-sized mountain of resentment towards China for standing by while the virus escaped its land. It is also true, according to everything we know, that Long wasn't thinking of their ethnicity when he killed six women in Atlanta. He killed them (and two men) because he was a religious nut who saw the existence of sex workers as a threat to his deeply fragile self-esteem. 

This is why Mejia's story, and another similar one about a Koreatown rally that appeared on the same page, makes people not trust the major media anymore. The media know that if you are going to postulate a wave of anti-Asian hysteria sweeping the land you need some extremely serious incidents to make the case. Mere instances of name-calling and jostling in the street aren't going to do it. That's why so many in the media have seized on the otherwise unrelated Atlanta sex murders as a way to prove their contention that America is racist to the core.