On July 29 in Brooklyn, New York, 28-year-old O’Shae Sibley was stabbed to death after an altercation at a gas station. The press has made two things abundantly clear: Sibley was a gay black man, and the stabbing is being investigated as a hate crime. One glaring omission has been consistent across most of the media’s coverage. The men who attacked Sibley were Muslim and, according to one witness, shouted, “We Muslim and we don’t like gays!”
The media are twisting themselves in knots to avoid mentioning this. This piece from NBC describes his attackers only as “a group of men.” An article at CNN uses similarly vague language and includes a handpicked quote from the assistant chief of NYPD’s detective bureau: “The suspect is being charged with a hate crime based on statements from the group in general. You have a lot of anti-gay statements, and a lot of derogatory statements being made — anti-black — from the group and from the defendant himself.”
CNN could not be less descriptive and more obtuse if it tried. The vagueness is intended to let readers’ minds wander, using their own biases to draw conclusions about who might stab a black gay man.
A tweet from The New York Times describes Sibley’s attackers only as “men” who used “slurs.” An article at MSNBC covered the incident in a typical dishonest fashion by excluding the motivation of the attackers, but MSNBC did not miss the opportunity to conflate this stabbing with people who
