One Image Sums Up the Media's Double Standard in Covering the #ChapelHillShooting

Impact

Three Muslim students were killed Tuesday in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the media hardly seemed to care.

Nine hours after the attack, which occurred at 5 p.m. Eastern, there was little media coverage and no national coverage by major news organizations.

In other words:

Or, to put it another way:

While not yet confirmed by police, based on the shooter's social media posts and the victims' religion and race, many are already speculating the attack was a religiously motivated, Islamophobic hate crime. 

Though a number of online publications have picked up and covered the story by Wednesday, most mainstream media organizations seem to have ignored the shooting. Considering the 24-hour news cycle and how quickly most news is disseminated, the slow speed with which the news broke is troubling.

People have taken to Twitter and Facebook using the hashtag #ChapelHillShooting to attack the mainstream media for this delay and lack of coverage:

As journalist Ben Norton wrote on his website, "In spite of all of the uncertainty, one thing is clear: If the victims had been white Christians, the story would have been on every channel and every news site. And if they had been white Christians murdered by a Muslim, the entire country would have gone on lock-down and we would hear about the attack non-stop for the next month."