Heroes, Villains & Victims: the ‘Sikh Temple Gunman’

Today is one of those ‘choose your news’ kind of days. MSNBC is currently focusing on the Olympics, flooding in Manila, the Mars Rover landing, and medical malfeasance. The Huffington  Post is taking a closer look at the Syrian Civil War, a current event that has been cleverly ignored by American politicians.   The New York Times and Fox News, however, are two major media outlets milking the ‘Sikh Temple shooting’ story for all it is worth, with stories related to the event appearing on their respective homepages. This is logical, since the shooting still has some attention-mileage left in it, particularly as the chilling details of the killer’s private lifestyle unfold.




But there is not much more ‘story’ to be gotten out of the ‘Sikh Temple’ story, in part due to the fact that, unlike that ‘Dark Knight’ shooter, James Holmes, the gunman in this latest massacre is dead, and (unfamous) dead people make for dull stories. This latest attention wave is fading, fast:




If Google Insights is any indication, the shooting is a ‘came and went’ sort of spontaneous wave. Perhaps, seeing the way the James Holmes ‘massacre’ story came-and-went, the public have trained themselves to push stories like this quickly into the attics of consciousness, to avoid wasting much time on them. It seems that the ‘media’ understand this too, which would explain why most outlets have moved on from this latest story. It’s wavelength is too short to waste much time with.


But if one were so inclined to carry on with a story like the ‘Sikh Temple shooting’, where would one possibly find something of interest? The people involved, that’s where. It is thus  fitting that the two media outlets still ‘interested’ in riding the ‘Sikh Temple’ wave, have chosen to focus on either the ‘heroes’ in this tale, or the ‘villains’.


Oak Creek Police Lt. Brian Murphy was unfortunately shot 9 times while responding to the shooting, and his colleague on the force, Sam Lenda, is credited with killing the gunman, Wade Michael Page. Officers Murphy and Lenda will take the role of ‘heroes’ in this drama.  Fox News is running with this ‘hero’ angle. Such a move is consistent with Fox’s  themes of ‘patriotism’ , ‘god bless America’, and ‘support the troops’, the conservative news network aligns itself with.


But  not so the left-leaning  New York Times. The Times has chosen to ‘run with Page’ in squeezing the last bit of human interest in the Sikh shooting. The ‘villain’ in the Sikh temple drama, Wade Michael Page, was a  40-year old Army veteran/ white supremacist. Those details – his military history, skinhead-culture affiliation -  are the ‘hook’ in this story, the most compelling details of this tragedy. Investigating the lives of the ‘villains’ who perpetuate horrific crimes has a long history in the media, largely because, prior to their crimes, these ‘villains’ are invisible to society. They live shadowy existences; engage in ‘deviant’ practices; and hang out in places most ‘normal’ Americans would never (openly) visit.Villains such as Wade Page, James Holmes, and many before them are ‘transgressors’. And no matter how one feels about those who ‘break the rules’ of society, society cannot ignore such people once they explode into consciousness.


But the media can decide how to present such characters to the public, or whether to speak on these people at all. Fox News is shying away from probing Page’s past simply because it is uncomfortable with the fact that doing so will force them to investigate any possible ‘role’ Page’s military history might have played in his ‘development’ as a hate-filled individual. Fox knows that it has a healthy viewership / content consumption ratio within the Military community, and does not want to offend its consumers by getting into the messy details of an individual whose troubled past was surely personal, but whose life story also drags the military into it. So Fox News has chosen to focus on the ‘heroes’ in the drama: Law Enforcement. The Times, unfettered by a need to avoid offending the military community, was able to tell the more ‘interesting’ story by focusing on Page.


But what about the victims? I was speaking with a friend yesterday, and that very question came up: why does the media do such an excellent job of ignoring the victims when terrible events such as the Sikh temple killings happen? I thought about it, and  replied : because the media finds the heroes and the villains more interesting. Remember, outside of local news and weather, most ‘news’ is optional. In a highly-stable society like America, stories of violence are common areas of focus in nightly newscasts.  In such crime stories, mugshots, and ‘perp-walks’ are regularly shown as the media shows the ‘villains’ to their viewers, often mentioning the victims of the criminal in passing, along with – maybe – an emotional reaction shot of the victims relatives/friends. But any lengthy focus on the victims themselves  don’t play very well – and are thus avoided -  because ‘victimization’ is inconsistent with the adjectives most Americans would use to describe this country. Americans don’t really want to see ‘victims’ reflected back to us in the media, despite how much we would like to believe this is not so.  This phenomenon was on full display in the fallout after 9/11. America was hurt, and, like any proud, strong nation, retaliated. The good guy (America) and bad guy (Taliban/Bin Laden/terrorist) theme was as prominent as it always is on the nightly news.  The only difference being that ‘cops and crooks’ were replaced with ‘Patriots and terrorists’.    Good versus evil is woven thickly into the fabric of American mythology.


And therefore it is nearly-impossible to sell the perspective of the ‘victim’  to the American public . A simple Google search, limited to results from within the last 24 hours, does not have a single result devoted to the victims or their families. It does, however, have a quote from the killer’s stepmother:





There is one column on the New York Times site that offers a half-glimpse into the perspective of the victims. The article, ‘Being Sikh in America‘ is the only one credited to Mr. Amardeep Singh, an Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University. One is supposed to assume that Mr. Singh’s article is related to the massacre in Wisconsin.  In truth, the article is not at all about any of the  seven victims at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin; it is about one man’s take on the experience of  Sikhs in America. In other words, Mr. Singh’s article is an attention scam, that uses the pretext of an attention wave – the Sikh temple shooting -  to talk about something generally relegated to the attics of American consciousness: Sikhs.


Therefore, it can be said that essentially no ink has been devoted to the victims. Is the reason for this sensitivity or consideration for the grieving families? Perhaps,  but I doubt it. The answer is more likely that, when a crime or a tragedy occurs, and the media scrambles to ‘storify’ the event, it needs ‘characters’ who the public can clearly align themselves to. People can can align themselves with, and aspire to be, heroes and villains. But, in America at least, nobody wants to align themselves with being a ‘victim’; it is too depressing………..