Fox News reports that NBC has stayed ‘true to their audience’ as they have corrected the pronouns in their coverage of the Annunciation Catholic School shooter in Minneapolis to reflect what the biological male claims as his gender-identity. The correction, added to the bottom of the NBC article, states, “A previous version of this article used the wrong pronoun for the shooter. She used female pronouns.”
Robert Westman, who prefers to be called Robin, is responsible for the mass shooting late last month that injured 18 and killed two children, Fox also reported.
Joshua Arnold, senior writer for The Washington Stand, spoke with Jody Hice on Washington Watch about the crazy situation of this case.
“The police identified that this young man was, in fact, a man. He had been living and identifying as a woman or at least as transgender in some ways. He legally changed his name from a masculine name to a more gender-neutral name at the age of 17, and his parents consented to that name change,” Arnold said.
However, Arnold states that, in some of the shooter’s writings, he admitted that he could never be a woman. The Catholic News Agency reports that notes from Westman revealed on YouTube say that he wrote “I regret being trans” and wished “I never brainwashed myself.”
“Yet you have so many of the legacy media outlets using female pronouns to describe him, referring to him as a woman. In the case of NBC, they referred to him as a man and then corrected the article and said, ‘oh, he actually, or she, they, used female pronouns.’ Well, maybe he did at one point, but he was confused, and now your audience is, too,” Arnold says.
He believes that one reason behind this change is because of the editorial guidelines from The Associate Press. These guidelines, which are very far left, are followed closely by many major news organizations.
It’s not only about the AP. NBC is also preaching to its choir.
“NBC knows their audience, and they know that their left-wing audience expects this and demands it of them. They'll get in trouble from the scolds over on Blue Sky if they don't use preferred pronouns. So, instead of sticking with the truth, they decided to instead tell their audience what their itching ears wanted to hear,” Arnold explains.
Sadly, NBC is not the only news outlet that has fallen into the false gender narrative. Arnold shares how he has seen other mainline news sites refer to the shooter as a woman, but not all of them have.
“I have been pleasantly surprised to see some that used to follow preferred pronoun guidelines seem to be moving away from that. Sites like Fox News and the New York Post seem to be moving away from that,” Arnold says.
He mentions that, normally, truly conservative sites, such as the Daily Wire and the Washington Stand, are the only ones that will use biologically true pronouns. It is also the policy for AFN to use biologically correct pronouns.
Conservatives say the goal is not to stigmatize gender-confused individuals but to try to stop the culture from denying reality. Furthermore, journalists are supposed to report fact and not fiction.
Media: You’ve got one (main) job
Arnold asks what the purpose of reporters is if they are not reporting fact?
“That's our job. I research what happened and then present a shortened true version of that so that other people can learn what happened without having to do all the same research I did. If I don't do that reliably, then people can't trust what I say,” states Arnold. “That's what we've seen with the mainstream media. Over time we’ve seen the amount of Americans that trust media is in the tank.”
Arnold referenced a Gallup poll that shows Americans’ trust in media and political institutions. According to the poll, only 31% of Americans actually have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media to report the news fairly accurately.
But it is not just the responsibility of the reporters to tell the truth.
“It's also the responsibility of Christians. We need to tell the truth, confront people, that this is not true, that these people living a transgender lifestyle are hurting themselves by not living life in the way God intended,” Arnold concludes.
