Two church shootings, two killers, endless media double standards

Two church shootings, a decade apart, received strikingly different treatment from America’s corporate media. The first occurred in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. The second took place in Minneapolis just last week.

On June 18, 2015, CBS News reported:

A white man opened fire in a historic black church, in Charleston, South Carolina, the night of June 17, 2015, killing nine people, including a pastor, during a prayer meeting. The suspect, Dylann Roof, was arrested in North Carolina and extradited to South Carolina June 18, 2015, for what authorities are calling a hate crime.

On June 28, 2025, CBS News reported:

Two young children were killed and 18 others were injured in a shooting during a Catholic Mass packed with young students in south Minneapolis Wednesday morning. The shooter is also dead.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said the shooting triggered a massive law enforcement response to Annunciation Catholic Church at West 54th Street between Harriet and Garfield avenues around 8:30 a.m. The church is connected to a school building.

The shooter approached from the outside of the building and fired a rifle through the church windows toward children and worshippers. The shooter also used a shotgun and a pistol that he had legally purchased ‘recently,’ O’Hara said.

Both reports were written one day after the massacres. Both shooters were identified by that point. Yet the second account omitted key information about the shooter.

Establishment media needs to look at the facts — and report them. While they do, they should also look in the mirror.

What a shock when Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey used a press conference on the very day of the church massacre to pivot from murdered children to a lecture on transgender rights and gun control.

“I have heard about a whole lot of hate that’s being directed at our trans community,” Frey told reporters at an afternoon briefing.

He went on:

Anybody who is using this ... as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity. We should not be operating out of a place of hate for anyone.

In truth, no one should be shocked by Frey’s diversion. This is the same mayor who let Minneapolis burn in 2020, which included the torching of a police station. His record of weakness is already clear.

And this year, he’s locked in a tough re-election fight against Omar Fateh, a bona fide democratic socialist. To survive, Frey is racing leftward, stooping to whatever level he thinks will protect his job.

The real revelation from his comments wasn’t his tired blame-shifting but his admission that the shooter identified as transgender — a fact establishment media has rushed to bury.

The killer, born Robert Westman, legally changed his name to Robin Westman in January 2020 at age 17. The petition states that he “identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification.”

Such details were not hidden for anyone willing to look. Hours before the massacre, Westman posted videos that exposed both his planning and his hatred.

In one, he flipped through pages of a handwritten manifesto laying out why he chose Annunciation — the Catholic church and school he had graduated from in 2017:

I am feeling good about Annunciation. It seems like a good combo of easy attack form and devastating tragedy and I want to do more research. I have concerns about finding a large enough group. I want to avoid any parents, but pre and post school drop off.

In another, Westman showed off his arsenal. His gun magazines bore hand-scrawled taunts, including the chilling phrase: “Where is your God?”

Basic facts become optional

Ten years ago, coverage of Charleston leaned heavily on words like “white” and “white supremacist.” Reporters stressed Dylann Roof’s race from the outset, and his racist motivations were treated as central to the story. That was fair. His ideology mattered, and his identity explained why he targeted a black church.

But why is the same standard not applied today?

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Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

Westman was transgender. Court filings documented his legal name change to “Robin” and the reasons behind it. His own videos revealed a deeply disturbed mind, with specific plans to attack Annunciation and taunts of his victims scrawled on his weapons. These are facts. They belong in basic reporting. Including them doesn’t equate “transgender” with “deranged” any more than “white” equates to “white supremacist.”

Yet the difference in coverage is glaring. In Charleston, identity was headline news. In Minneapolis, it was buried. Everyone knows why. Westman’s story doesn’t serve the establishment narrative, so the press ignored it.

A reckoning for mainstream media

Journalism once prided itself on covering the unexpected — the classic “man bites dog.” That’s over. News today is about reinforcing narratives, not reporting facts.

Americans see through it. They know why trust in media sits at historic lows. They see newspapers hemorrhaging readers, network news losing viewers, and MSNBC shrinking into a dumb rebrand. The bias is obvious, the omission blatant, and the public is done playing along.

People usually know when they’re being lied to. They also know that half-truths amount to half-lies at best. The press pushed the Russia hoax with glee. They buried Hunter Biden’s laptop. They shielded the public from Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline.

The left depends on this cocoon. It shelters them from the clash between their mistaken beliefs and stubborn reality. And the establishment media — blind to their own collapse in credibility — gladly supply the insulation.

In Minneapolis, the slaughter of Catholic schoolchildren should have shattered the narrative. Instead, the media treated it like an inconvenience. They will glance at it briefly before memory-holing what doesn’t fit.

If they have any integrity left, they’ll face the facts — and face themselves. Because the real scandal isn’t just what they cover. It’s what they refuse to see.