The New York Times, still unaware there’s an internet, is trying to pass off the Nigerian as a Californian, the non-doctor as a doctor, and Mr. Obotetukudo as “Dr. Bello.”
In the NYT ‘s major biographical profile of Bello the next day, he was described as a “sharp dresser from California.” The only other reference to the shooter’s provenance came several paragraphs later: “Dr. Bello lived in California off and on from 1991 until 2006.”
ABC News had reported on the day of the shooting that Bello was a “Nigerian national”—so the cat was already out of the bag, New York Times. Local New York station PIX11 also reported that he was a Nigerian. Even newspapers in Ohio knew that Bello was a Nigerian.
But as we go to print, the NYT still has not identified Bello as a Nigerian immigrant. It issued a “correction,” but only to clarify the exact street of a homeless shelter where Bello had lived. No correction to the “California” bit.
Sadly, the NYT didn’t allow any comments to the online version of its story, but CBS did. There were four comments, two about the incident (“rot in hell”) and two about CBS’s report:
“Where was Bello born?”
and:
“Where is he from? Where did he receive his medical degree? Worthless reporting.”
You’re not fooling anyone, media.
Having misled readers about Bello’s nationality, the NYT professed utter bafflement about the shooter’s motive, saying it was “marked with as many questions as answers.”
If the NYT simply reported facts, instead of strategically constructing news stories to protect favored groups, it might have noticed that there have been a LOT of mass shootings by certain types of immigrants.
There are mental illness shootings, gangland shootings, still-angry-about-the-divorce shootings and so on. Some immigrant murderers are mentally ill or criminals—thanks to our excellent and extremely rigorous vetting system! But there are enough like Mr. Obotetukudo to qualify as their own category: the Disappointed Immigrant mass shootings.
The usual elements are: 1) immigrants from wildly different cultures, who have 2) unrealistic expectationsabout what their lives should be like in the U.S., combined with 3) an inability to achieve success in the U.S., and 4) a failure to grasp our customs—often, even our language, typically marked by..
