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The first duty of public journalism after a massacre is simple: name the dead, establish the sequence, and tell the truth about what is known and what is not. That is media hygiene. That is how a public learns. That is how systems get fixed.

Instead, we got a firewall.

In the immediate wake of the Tumbler Ridge killings—home first, then school; five students dead, an education assistant dead; the perpetrator dead by suicide—the national conversation was quickly steered away from forensic clarity and toward reputational triage. In at least one major network segment, the frame was explicit: the story was “anti-trans disinformation” after the shooting. Not the chain of events. Not the failure points. Not the institutional blind spots. The message was prophylactic: watch what you say; the real danger is how people might talk about it.

This is not merely tone-deaf. It’s a form of complicity.

Not complicity in the act, obviously—complicity in what follows: the slow, predictable replacement of accountability with moral theatre. When a newsroom’s first instinct is to manage narrative risk, it begins to treat facts as flammable materials—things to handle with gloves, filter through approved experts, and keep away from ordinary citizens who might draw the “wrong” conclusions.

That is how gatekeepers lose legitimacy. And it is how tragedies become recurring.

The mechanism: switch the object of fear

Watch the pivot closely and it’s always the same move.

1. A real event happens in the world—blood, bodies, families blown open.
2. The newsroom identifies a second-order risk: public anger, political fallout, reputational damage to a protected consensus.
3. The coverage shifts from “What happened?” to “What must we prevent?”
4. Prevention is defined as protecting a narrative, not repairing a system.

The object of fear changes. Instead of fearing the next killing, the institutions fear the next argument.

So they tell you the problem is “misinformation.” They tell you the danger is “conflation.” They tell you this is a moment for “community support” and “protecting vulnerable people.” And those may all be decent impulses—in their proper place, at their proper time. But as a lead story? As the framing lens? As the moral of the segment?

That’s not reporting. That’s crisis communications.

“Don’t conflate” becomes a solvent

One line in particular functions like a solvent in the modern media ecosystem:

Don’t conflate an identity with violence.

Fine. True in the general case. But after a massacre, deployed as the first moral reflex, it does more than discourage scapegoating. It quietly discourages inquiry.

Because inquiry is not a vibe. Inquiry is a chain:

• What was the timeline?
• What were the warning signs?
• Who saw what?
• What interventions were tried?
• Where did they fail?
• What policies shaped those failures?
• What is going to change next week because children are dead?

A solvent doesn’t “refute” those questions. It dissolves the social permission to ask them. It turns scrutiny into contamination.

That is why it feels so out of touch to grieving parents: it is journalism behaving as if the central public hazard is discussion rather than risk.

Media complicity looks like this

Complicity, in this context, is not about malice. It’s about habit.

It’s the habitual choice to protect institutions from accountability by rerouting attention:

• From the scene to the discourse.
• From the victims to the community statement.
• From the timeline to the think-piece.
• From “what failed?” to “what mustn’t be said?”

A professional newsroom used to be allergic to this. The old standards—imperfect, often biased, frequently arrogant—still had a core ethic: facts first, advocacy last. If advocacy entered the frame, it was labeled as such. If uncertainty existed, it was named. If a claim couldn’t be verified, it didn’t get aired as settled truth.

Today, too often, we get advocacy laundering: press-release moralizing presented as news, with the added twist that dissent is treated as a moral defect rather than a factual dispute.

That is not neutrality. That is narrative commitment wearing a blazer.

What “media hygiene” used to mean (and must mean again)

A return to old standards isn’t nostalgia. It’s practical survival. Here’s what media hygiene looks like when it’s done properly—especially after mass violence:

1) Victims first.
Name the dead. Describe the community. Make the loss real before you make it useful.

2) Sequence before interpretation.
Timeline, confirmed facts, and clearly separated unknowns. No moral “lesson” until the basic chain is established.

3) Mechanisms over slogans.
If firearms were involved, the mechanism is access and storage—specific failures, not national clichés. If mental health is part of the background, the mechanism is escalation thresholds and follow-up—specific gaps, not hashtags.

4) No prophylactic framing.
Do not lead with “misinformation,” “backlash,” or “what this might fuel.” Those are downstream effects. They are not the event.

5) Don’t pre-label inquiry as bigotry.
Scapegoating is wrong. So is shutting down investigation by treating questions as dangerous.

6) Separation of church and newsroom.
Advocacy voices may be relevant. They must not become the controlling lens. Journalists should interrogate them the way they interrogate police, politicians, and corporations.

7) Corrections that cost you pride.
If you get something wrong, correct it prominently, not performatively. Trust is built when gatekeepers admit error without theatrics.

None of this requires “hating” anyone. It requires doing the job.

The consequence of failing the job

When media behaves like a narrative defense force, the public does not become more compassionate. It becomes more suspicious. It begins to assume that every tragedy will be translated into a pre-approved moral. It begins to look elsewhere for facts—often to sources far less responsible, far more conspiratorial, and far more cynical.

That is the boomerang effect of the firewall: the attempt to prevent “bad interpretations” produces a credibility vacuum, and the vacuum fills with poison.

If journalists want to stop that cycle, they can’t do it by lecturing the public into compliance. They can only do it by earning trust the old way: through sequence, clarity, restraint, and the disciplined refusal to turn atrocity into messaging.

Because if the first move after a massacre is to protect a narrative, the system will not learn.

And if the system does not learn, it will repeat. 🕯️