SAN BERNARDINO SHOOTING

        According to Los Angeles Times, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik opened fire at a holiday party in San Bernardino on December 2nd. The couple killed fourteen people and injured 22. The attackers were both killed in a gun battle with the police. The scene was captured on a cell phone video by a local eyewitness, who appeared to start filming right as shots began ringing out during the dramatic car chase. The investigation is taking place in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Riverside, Corona, Redlands and San Bernardino. Officials believe it was an act of terrorism since Farook had some kind of digital contact with people from at least two terrorist organizations overseas, including the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front in Syria and Shabab in Somalia.

            Later on the police found out that Farook, who was born in the United States and worked for the country, and Malik, a Pakistan national, had an arsenal of ammunition and pipe bombs in their Redlands home. The arsenal included 2.000 9-millimeter rounds, more than 2.500 .223 rounds, several hundred .22 long rifle rounds and 19 pipes that could be converted into bombs. Two federal sources told The Times that before the shooting and their subsequent deaths, the couple was in the final planning stages for an assault on a separate building or location “with a lot more people inside”, possible at a nearby school or college. They based that assessment on data from digital equipment also recovered from the couple’s Redlands home.

            Most of the investigation is focusing on Malik and Farook’s digital lives, including how they communicated early in their relationship, and with terror groups. The couple jointly pledged allegiance to Islamic State on their social media shortly before they were killed in the shootout with the police. Two top federal law enforcement officials said Malik sent at least two private messages on Facebook to a group of Pakistani friends in 2012 and 2014, pledging her support for Islamic jihad and telling them she hoped to join the fight one day. One of her family members in Pakistan told The Times that she posted messages of religious extremism on her Facebook account and that it was a source of concern for them.

            Farook’s friend, Enrique Marquez, bought two of the guns used in the attack. When Marquez didn’t show up on December 4 for his shift as a doorman at Morgan’s Tavern, a pirate-themed neighborhood bad, his co-workers became concerned. Then they saw a strange note that he had posed on his Facebook page after midnight the previous day saying “ I am very sorry guys, it was a pleasure”. The co-workers thought he may have become suicidal but in fact, he entered a mental health facility after the massacre. According to the United States law enforcement officials, Marquez has been cooperating with the investigation of the massacre.

             Farook and Malik began plotting a terror attack before they were even engaged and before Malik moved to the United States last year. The police are still trying to determine whether they had links to foreign terror organizations, and the investigation still continues.

            The gathering process was quiet complex. All the different news sources talked about what happened, about the investigation and about what the police think.  I decided to use most of the information from the Los Angeles Times because first of all, it is a news company from California, which is where the mass shooting happened, second because it had an easy access to all the stories involving the San Bernardino shooting and all its updates, and third because it has extended articles that focus on victimization (a topic that I find really interesting).

            To study this event, first, I looked up various summaries of the shooting. Some of them were really short so I tried to look for extended versions to make sure I got as many details as I could. After I felt I was well informed of the event, I looked up articles that focus on what the police have to say about the case. The Los Angeles Times gave me an extended summary of the facts and of the investigation that is currently happening, which is really helpful when writing about criminal coverage in the media. After learning about the investigation I started looking into the articles that focus on the society’s response after the shooting. How they feel and what are the safety procedures they are taking. To finish, I focused on the articles that talk about the victims and that can be narrowed into the victimization category.

            Since the investigation is still ongoing it is harder to identify specific trends. Most of the articles and news reports strictly focus on what the police say rather than subtly taking a side like news organizations tend to do.

            The first trend I would like to identify is the victimization of the people who got shot. The first article I found is called “San Bernardino shooting victims: Who they were” by The Los Angeles Times. The story has an article and a video. The video starts with all the names of the people who died during the shooting to create an impact and start off with the victimization process. The first few sentences of the article say the following: “father of six. A free-spirit who befriended strangers in the grocery store checkout line. A mother of three who fled religious persecution in Iran. A woman who was 8 when she and her mother left Vietnam for a better life. The youngest was 26. The oldest was 60.”

            The same thing can be found on the CNN and BBC websites. The CNN article is called “San Bernardino Shooting: Who were the victims?.” The story has also a video followed by an article. The BBC story is called “San Bernardino Shooting: Who are the victims”. As we can see, all the articles have pretty much the same title. Not only they have the same title, the content of the articles and videos is also very similar. The only difference is that the LA Times, has longer pieces on each one of the victims.

            The second trend I identified is the need for a step-by-step narration of the investigation. The news organizations saw the need in the audience for an explanation on what is happening during the investigation, so they wrote this concise articles about it. Different news organizations wrote articles explaining, as said before, the investigation step by step. The LA Times had in my opinion the best article. It is called “Everything we know about the San Bernardino attack investigation”. The article has different sections such as: “Enrique Marquez, the neighbor”, “An even better attack was planned”, “The weapons”, “What we know about the previous attack plan”, and “The shooters’ online communicators”.

            ABC news also wrote an article about the investigation. This one wasn’t as explicit as the LA Times one but it also narrated the investigation in process. The article is called “Major developments in the San Bernardino terror investigation”. The CNN news organization also included a similar article. They also incorporated a video on top of the page. The article is structured like the one in the LA Times, it had different sections explaining the different parts of the investigation such as “Target practice before the attack”, “Sources: Authorities raid Malik’s former home”, “Former neighbor gave shooter weapons” and so on.

            As said before, since the investigation is not over, all the videos, articles, and reports focus on what the police want us to know. None of the articles from the different news organizations actually bring something new to the table, they all dance around the same topics. At the same time is understandable, the police probably doesn’t want to leak information that could be dangerous for the community if reported. As the investigators keep putting pieces together, the articles will progress with the investigation.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-san-bernardino-shooting-live-updates-htmlstory.html

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-san-bernardino-shooting-terror-investigation-htmlstory.html

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-sb-guns-20151209-story.html

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-san-bernardino-shooting-victims-htmlstory.html

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-san-bernardino-shooting-victims-htmlstory.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/friend-of-san-bernardino-shooter-is-at-center-of-fbi-investigation/2015/12/13/13c53a1c-a1b6-11e5-b53d-972e2751f433_story.html

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35000086

http://abcnews.go.com/US/san-bernardino-investigation-fbi-searches-lake-clues-victims/story?id=35712292

http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/08/us/san-bernardino-shooting/

http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/03/us/san-bernardino-shootings-victims/index.html

http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/04/opinions/bergen-san-bernardino-terror-attack-explain/?iref=obnetwork

DEXTER

      

                   It all starts with Dexter driving though the streets of Miami thinking that something is going to happen on that night. Dexter kidnaps Mike Donivan, a pastor who had raped kids and had killed them. Dexter takes him to a cabin in the woods where he makes Mike look at the dead bodies of the kids Mike had killed. After that Dexter straps Mike to a table naked. Then, he makes an incision in Mike’s cheek and collects his blood and then he tortures him until he dies. While Dexter is going home, he explains how he doesn’t know why he has the need to kill. He also talks about his parents and how they are both dead, although he didn’t kill them. He loved his adoptive parents. Dexter explains how he kills following his dad’s code, who as a police officer, taught him how to avoid being caught and to kill those who deserve it because the police can’t get all the bad boys so there needs to be someone out there to get the rest, Dexter. Dexter receives a call from his sister Debra who says she is at a crime scene and needs help. Dexter investigates a series of murderers that are all related and helps his sister to have more recognition from the police department. Dexter next victim is Jamie Kaworski, a rapist and murderer. He kills Jamie, collects his blood and adds it to his collection. Dexter has a weird boyfriend- girlfriend type of relationship. He is dating Rita Benett, a domestic violence victim. They both are uncomfortable with sexual activities for different reasons so it makes the relationship a tiny bit awkward. After almost having sex for the first time with Rita, Dexter goes home and finds a doll’s head on his refrigerator door. Inside the freezer, he finds the other parts of the doll, chopped like the series of crimes he has been following. 

          Although Dexter is a serial killer, American society loves him.  The director did a really good job selecting the casting and getting all the scenes right. Due to the good directing and good casting the audience empathizes with an undercover serial killer. As critic Lucia Grosaru said, Dexter is not portrayed as a monster, he isn’t the typical serial killer marked by obvious deviant behavior. He is just a man with an addiction. American society understands addiction, one extra piece of chocolate, one last cigarette, one last line of cocaine, and one last victim. Another reason the audience can relate with Dexter is because he is really rational. Every single time he kills someone he seems to have a rational explanation for it, therefore the audience thinks it is right too. Also, in several cases, American society hasn’t been too happy with the judges and courts. Everyday, rapists, murderers, and thieves get away without any kind of punishment, but Dexter is there to get them what they deserve and the audience is fine with it. 

            On the one hand, Dexter isn’t much different from all the other superheroes. He has a secret double life, he appears from nowhere when he is needed, he has a different outfit when he is in action, and he is here to make this world a better place. 

            I believe the public has a fascination over serial killers because they are the only representation of death. Although most of us can't relate to any of the criminal cases because we haven't experienced anything like that ourselves, someone else has experienced it and that is the representation of death we are looking for. 

Jordi Arias Case

Jordi Arias was accused of first-degree murder in the death of her former boyfriend. Prosecutors said that in the summer of 2008 after the couple had broken up, Arias stabbed her former boyfriend 27 times, slit his throat and shot him in the head as he showered. She pleaded not guilty to the crime and the jury was undecided over if she was a cold-blooded murderer or was a victim of domestic violence.

Both, ABC news and International Business Times, used the information of the case to display Arias as a victim of domestic violence. Whiteley states that women who commit violent crimes are often portrayed as people who have crossed the boundary of appropriate gender role expectations and did so of their own accord. Women who do so are demonized and they are at times depicted by the media in masculine terms, as it is the male who owns the rights to violence. Opposite to what Whiteley says, ABC news did a follow up story of the Arias case where Arias’ defense attorney revealed what the convicted killer is really like, stating that Arias was really very chatty and smiley, adjectives who tend to be related to feminine women.

On the other side, Arizona Central describes each of the steps that led to sentence Arias. On March 25, 2013 Arizona Central published an article explaining that a cross-examination expert diagnosed Arias with post-traumatic stress disorder. As Whiteley says, society’s explanation for a women committing a violence crime is “she kills because she is mad or mentally ill.” Arizona Central somehow seemed to support this idea.

According to the Huffington post she didn’t get away with death penalty because she was a woman, but because she was born white and the US justice system don’t give death penalties to white women. As Whiteley stated, the study of the media and the depiction of female offenders calls to their attention the bias towards white women and further details how this bias is situated within the media narratives.  If Arias would have been born black, it would have been a different story.

In my opinion, I believe society’s perception of women is wrong. Women, as men can also be cold-blooded murderers. They can stab, they can shoot, they can poison, just like men. What shocks me the most is that when a women commits a violent crime, the first thing that crosses our minds is “it was probably self defense” or “she was probably a victim of domestic violence”, instead of “this woman just killed someone”. If a man kills his partner, none of this thought come across our minds, the only thing we think is “this man just killed his wife”, and there is never room for “he was probably acting on self defense.  

METH

As Linnemann and Wall say in their article, projects like Faces of Meth reaffirm and obscure the boundaries of white privilege. A powerful form of fear-induced name-calling expressed by middle and upper class whites, ‘white trash’ objectifies and stigmatizes whites living in poverty and lacking proper decorum.

Faces of Meth doesn’t represent an objective reality of meth use. They select the most shocking images exaggerate meth’s effects with the implication that all users eventually will appear as the faces in the ads do. Also, as Linnemann and Wall say, it is highly unlikely that the people selected by FOM use meth exclusively, making it a questionable strategy at best to name these images the ‘faces of meth’ or the ‘face’ of any other drug for that matter. Finally, and perhaps most importantly the images are deeply racialized, each featuring what appears to be a white body.


In my opinion, Faces of Meth should refocus their campaign. First of all, not all meth addicts are white. And second, not all meth addicts are in the same condition as the ones pictured on the ads. As said before, Faces of Meth only puts together the worse cases, therefore constructing a false reality. Linnemann and Wall article helped me be aware of the stereotypes within the meth world, and how even if ads are meant to be a help against the use of meth, they can also cause false expectations about the consumers.