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Glorification of the killer, from what I can tell, is almost entirely happening on social media. Mainstream media (or, perhaps more accurately, legacy media) is almost without exceptions, from what I can tell, condemning his act and is painting him in an unglamorous light by doing things like showing unflattering visual pictures of him, emphasizing family/friend interviews in which people say that they are shocked and horrified by what he did, and sometimes rightly or wrongly pointing out that he came from a fairly well-off background. The "sexy killer" angle is almost entirely being put forward on social media. Mainstream media is only referring to that angle occasionally and when it does, it's just in the form of "some people online are calling the killer sexy".
I don't think one needs any theory of a coordinated conspiracy to explain the divide. Mainstream media has powerful norms that prevent them from glorifying political violence in the US domestic politics context. Furthermore, after years of often well-justified populist rage against mainstream journalism lies, it is understandable why mainstream journalists would feel a personal interest in not doing anything to encourage acts of violence against supposed or real representatives of the "establishment".
One angle of the whole event that I have not seen pushed as much as I would wish is that law enforcement seems to have responded to this high-profile killing with a massive deployment of assets that I doubt they would have done if some random Joe Shmoe, say, got killed in a home invasion or a street robbery. This genuinely insults me. I feel like a basic tenet of modern civilization should be that society should at least try to stop all murders by using a significant deployment of state power. Not just when a high-profile person gets killed in a lurid and politically relevant way. It feels obnoxious to live in a society that decides how hard to crack down on murder based on the killed person's socioeconomic status and on the level of media coverage of the killing. It's hard to feel good paying one's tax money to such a society.
I hope that I am wrong, but honestly it feels hard for me to believe that if I was killed tomorrow by some angry person or some street criminal, the nation's various police forces would devote nearly as much energy to finding the killer and bringing him to justice as they just did in trying to solve this case of the killed CEO. I understand the argument that society maybe should pay extra attention to deterring political assassinations, but I do not find it convincing on the most fundamental emotional level. I do not enjoy living in a society that has such a multi-tier system for deciding which killings deserve maximum police effort.
It doesn't make sense to you that ideological assassinations would get more resources than a gang shooting or a homeless guy turning up full of holes? We're talking cold blooded murder of one dude walking down a street here. I understand your feeling to an extent, but the nature of this crime is very different from the average murder among the lower classes. Usually there is some provocation and a lack of evidence for the latter. The former was premeditated, in cold blood, between two well-to-do higher class people who were strangers to one another (Mangione went hundreds of miles and must have spent a long time planning this), and a lot scarier.
Bob Lee getting killed in San Francisco last year got a lot less buzz, didn't it? I'm not sure why, but I would suggest that even though it was similar to this case with two well-to-do people being involved, in that case, it was not premeditated, it seemed to be over some personal dispute, and perhaps the perpetrator being an immigrant with a criminal history also had something to do with it. Edit: for a while it was suspected that a homeless person did it, which would also make leftists not want to celebrate such a thing (makes homeless look bad).
If the target was different, would your opinion be changed? Would this level of resources be appropriate for someone who shot Trump, or the man who shot Shinzo Abe?
Wasn't the Bob Lee murder about the alleged suspects sister sexual assault at the hands of a Bob Lee drug / sex party acquaintence / friend, allegedly?
I really am still not clear, after reading about it to post. But because it wasn't an ideological assassination, apparently reddit and other social medias didn't see fit to look very positively on it, other than general smirking that a billionaire died. That's my guess, anyway.
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