The line in media between poor editorial choices and anti-religious agitprop was blurred again this week after newsrooms appeared to blame the victims of a massacre in Mexico, which claimed the lives of three adult women and six children and left an additional five children injured.
The victims, all U.S. citizens, were members of a Mormon community that settled decades ago in northern Mexico. The mothers and their children had traveled in three separate vehicles Monday from their settlement in Sonora, Mexico, to a wedding in neighboring Chihuahua. Along the way, gunmen believed to be in the service of the cartels ambushed them, killing nine and leaving the rest for dead. Of the murdered, the oldest was 43-year-old Dawna Langford, and the youngest victims were 8-month-old twins, Titus Alvin Miller and Tiana Gricel Miller.
Yet, here is a sampling of how some American newsrooms have covered the ruthless massacre:
“Brutal Killings Spotlight Small Religious Sect in Mexico,” declared a since-amended New York Times headline. The story’s subhead declared also, “Fundamentalist religious communities have a long history in northern Mexico, dating back to settlers who practiced polygamy.”
The story’s opening line read originally, “The brutal killing of nine members of an American family in northern Mexico on Monday highlights the long history of religious fundamentalist settlers in the region.”
Really? That is what the brutal murders highlight?
The New York Times article also reported originally, “Initially, the family’s patriarch was part of a wave of religious rebels who headed south to practice polygamy, once it was banned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints … The settlers who put down stakes included Miles Park Romney, the great-grandfather of Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, and the party’s presidential nominee in 2012.”
New York Times editors amended the report later to ease its overwhelmingly unserious and insensitive tone.
But the newspaper’s tweet promoting the story is still live.
“The brutal killing of 9 members of an American family in northern Mexico on Monday highlights the long history of religious fundamentalist settlers in the region,” the New York Times said in a tweet that is as off-putting as the report it was hyping.
The brutal killing of 9 members of an American family in northern Mexico on Monday highlights the long history of religious fundamentalist settlers in the region. Our religion reporter, Elizabeth Dias, details their history back to the early 20th century. https://t.co/rfvtzdTN9i
— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 5, 2019
On the other side of the country, the L.A. Times went with an article titled, “U.S. victims in Mexico massacre were tied to family with a long history of violence.”
The article adds, “Some of the victims shared the last name LeBaron. … The family is perhaps best known for a series of killings perpetrated in the 1970s and 1980s, in both Mexico and the United States, by Ervil LeBaron — once called the ‘Mormon Manson’ — and a group of his followers.”
These families have not even buried their children yet, and here is the L.A. Times “dredging up completely unrelated events, committed by distant relatives, that happened more than a generation ago,” as the Dispatch’s David French accurately put it.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the Daily Mail reported that the “Mexico community that lost three mothers and six children in cartel massacre was founded by U.S. citizens fleeing a polygamy ban and has been blighted by drug violence, murder and abuse for decades.”
The report adds breathlessly, “And in 2016 one former resident detailed a harsh life inside the community.”
The Associated Press went with similar coverage, publishing a report Thursday titled, “Mexican killings spotlight Mormon history with polygamy.”
“The slaying in Mexico of nine people who belonged to a Mormon offshoot community where some people practice polygamy spotlights the mainstream church’s struggle to distance itself from plural marriage, which has a history in the faith but has long been denounced,” it reads.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is forced to confront its history of polygamy after nine women and children from a Mormon offshoot where some practice plural marriage died in a cartel ambush in Mexico. https://t.co/u7nBrBDmcV
— AP West Region (@APWestRegion) November 7, 2019
The only really pertinent detail regarding the LeBarons and what is believed to be a cartel-led massacre is that Benjamin LeBaron “was shot dead after speaking out against traffickers who kidnapped his brother for a $1-million ransom,” as the L.A. Times recounts (the New York Times originally made no mention of Benjamin LeBaron denouncing the cartels). That detail could in some way explain Monday’s massacre, but that is the only fact presented by the newsrooms mentioned in the above that has any immediate bearing on the slaughter. All this stuff about “fundamentalists,” “settlers,” polygamy, and “harsh” community life is needless gawking, and it comes at the expense of a family that has likely not even started the process of grieving.
Is it tone-deafness that allowed for these stories to go to print as they did? Or is there some sort of feverishly anti-religious bias that clouds the better judgment of reporters and editors covering a story involving butchered children?
Before we start dredging up decades-old stories about things their ancestors did, maybe we should let these families bury their dead.
