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At least two newspapers selectively – and sensationally – took killer Elliot Rodger at his word on Tuesday, featuring in their coverage of the multiple murders he committed last Friday one of many women he named in a sprawling memoir published after his death.
The New York Post and the Daily Mail published the name and picture Tuesday of a woman who encountered Rodger when she was 10 years old. “Killer Crush,” read the Post front page. The Mail said she had been “singled out.”
To illustrate their coverage, the papers, both of whom interviewed the woman’s father, included a photograph of the woman, an aspiring model, poolside in a bikini. The Mail included additional photographs, altered to hide identities, of other women named in Rodger’s memoir.
Rodger killed six people in Santa Barbara on Friday and wounded at least 12 before killing himself. In his memoir he described perceived rejections by girls and by women, and he called his plan to kill “retribution.”
Media ethicists on Tuesday criticized the newspapers’ coverage, saying it distorted facts of the case and was potentially harmful. The name of the woman featured on the front pages appears only three times in Rodger’s 141-page memoir. In the document, Rodger describes at length his hatred for more than a dozen peers, boys and girls; his anger at affectionate couples he saw in public; his intense resentment of his stepmother; his feeling of being abandoned by his father and his obsession with violent video games, among other influences.
"The images of a young woman in a bikini published by the New York Post and the Daily Mail are clearly designed to titillate readers, trivialising the reporting of this incredibly serious crime," Sarah Mathewson, campaigns manager at Object, a UK-based organization that challenges the sexual objectification of women, said in an email. "The newspapers repeatedly name and draw attention to the individual women that Elliot Rodger blamed, reinforcing the abhorrent notion that they are somehow the cause of this."
Neither the Daily Mail nor the Post replied to emails and phone calls requesting comment.
“I am hard-pressed to think of any justification for naming, much less publishing photos of, the women who were not shooting victims but whom Rodger blamed for what he did,” Robert Drechsel, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, said in an email. “Doing so adds nothing of value and public significance to the story, and can bring only harm and undeserved attention to those women.”
The father’s decision to participate in interviews with the papers did not change the ethical questions at stake, Drechsel said.
Kelly McBride, a professor of journalism ethics at the Poynter Institute, said the newspapers were following a familiar tabloid pattern: “distort the story” to fit a familiar and alluring narrative “in order to get traction.”
“In this particular case, naming the one girl from middle school – that plays into this narrative of the mean girls bullying the weak in middle school, and that there are consequences for that,” McBride said. “It’s an oversimplified narrative to begin with, and if you do any digging into the research around bullying or suicide, you will discover that in media we have played that narrative because it sells.
“So that’s an oversimplified narrative. Then on top of it, when the tabloids latch onto a detail in order to fit this story into a broader narrative, what they’re doing is trying to tap into this sense of righteous indignation, this familiar narrative that will get people’s hackles up.
“A lot of other people do that too, but that is a particular tabloid technique.”
A second New York tabloid, the Daily News, also ran a picture of the woman on its cover, although the photograph was altered to conceal her identity. “It Wasn’t Her Fault,” the accompanying headline read.
“I think there is a responsible way to use the manifesto,” said McBride, referring to Rodger’s memoir. “The journalistic thing to do is to add more context, and the type of context that will help audience members see his rantings for what they are. And perhaps educate them about what misogyny is, and what delusional thinking is, and what a sociopath looks like.”
Drechsel rejected the notion that Tuesday’s coverage amounted to business as usual for the misbehaving tabloids.
“This is different,” Drechsel wrote. “The women in question are private individuals living private lives, and I find using their names and photographs to be more than mildly offensive.”
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