Media’s empathetic coverage of Luigi Mangione reveals an obsession with humanizing white male suspects | Brian Thompson shooting

Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old who allegedly shot and killed the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has received an avalanche of media attention as people attempt to understand what may have driven him to commit such a violent crime.

Since Mangione’s arrest, news reports have attempted to piece together his supposed motivations, with some suggesting that a back injury – and his resulting inability to have intercourse – fueled his alleged resentment against the healthcare industry. Other reports have painted Mangione as a recluse who rejected his affluent upbringing, openly speculating on the “baffling journey” of a “star student”.

On social media, Mangione has received sympathy and, in some cases, has been celebrated for his suspected role in the murder. Meanwhile, a fundraiser for Mangione’s legal defense has collected nearly $150,000. Many have turned Mangione into a “martyr”, said Dr Joseph Richardson, a professor of African American studies, medical anthropology and epidemiology at the University of Maryland. But, he adds: “We clearly know had [Mangione] been a young Black man, the narrative would be different”.

The wall-to-wall coverage of Mangione has been interpreted as a result of Thompson’s status as a healthcare industry executive in a country where many people are frustrated about rising healthcare costs and lack of insurance coverage. But the acceptance of that explanation itself reflects a racist double standard. As Richardson sees it, the empathetic media coverage is a symptom of “white male privilege”.

Multiple studies have shown that white male perpetrators of gun violence, especially ones in high profile incidents such as mass shootings, are often depicted more compassionately by news outlets. According to one study, publications routinely speculate about white perpetrators’ mental health as a possible explanation for their actions, painting a complex picture of their motivations, whereas suspects of color are reduced to racial stereotypes.

White perpetrators’ mental health struggles are considered with consistently greater sympathy. For instance, Adam Lanza, who shot and killed six adults and 20 children in 2012 at the Sandy Hook School in Connecticut, was reported by several news outlets as having been failed by mental health experts and the victim of bullying. Jared Loughner, who murdered 19 people in a 2011 mass shooting in Tuscon, Arizona, was referred to as “troubled” in news reports, including in a profile tracing his upbringing. And in the 1999 Columbine school shooting, in which 15 people were killed, several news outlets perpetuated a myth that the shooters were bullied, and speculated about what resources could’ve been provided to prevent the shooting.

Even in local media stories, white perpetrators are given sympathetic portraits. In 2014, Joshua Boren, a Utah police officer, shot and killed his wife, two children, mother-in-law and himself after his wife accused Boren of raping her. Boren’s therapist later told police that Boren had repeatedly drugged his wife and recorded himself sexually assaulting her. Despite his history of domestic violence, news reports described Boren as a “teddy bear”.

“When the media coverage came out about the shooter himself, what they often talked about was his own personal background,” Scott Duxbury, an assistant professor of sociology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said of the Boren case. “Things like a lot of his coworkers, friends and family loved being around him, how unexpected it was, despite the fact that this was somebody who actually had an established history of abusing his wife”.

In Mangione’s case, the “search” for what might have motivated him to allegedly shoot Thompson is based on “assumptions of plausibility” and who is capable of committing crime – a racialized concept – according to Duxbury.

“When it’s a case of a Black or brown shooter, because there’s this deeply ingrained cultural stereotype about Black male criminality, the search for meaning isn’t as intensive because people just kind of believe it in the first place,” Duxbury said. “[Mangione] fits the demographic in other instances of high profile media coverage of shooters, [where] that type of person that elicits the search for meaning because [they don’t] look like what Americans typically stereotype as the usual suspect.”

Back in April, reporting on Terry Clark Hughes Jr, a Black man who was accused of killing four police officers in Charlotte, North Carolina, during an attempted arrest, focused on his criminal record and THC later discovered in his bloodstream. (Hughes was shot and killed by police during the incident.)

In 2021, Jason Nightengale, also a Black man, shot and killed five people at random during a rampage in the Chicago area, before being fatally shot by police. Subsequent coverage of Nightengale highlighted his arrest record and “menacing” videos he had posted to Facebook.

And in 2015, David Ray Conley, a Black man who shot and killed eight of his family members, including two children, did not elicit sympathetic portraits or explanations of his crime – though it was similar to the Boren killings. Instead, reports included Conley’s history of domestic violence and previous cocaine possession, according to a study by Duxbury and other researchers on media coverage. (Conley was sentenced to life in prison in 2021 for the murders.)

As early as the 1920s, Duxbury said, crimes committed by Black people would often be used to “justify narratives of biological inferiority” or advance claims of Black people having “less developed morals than white people”.

“When we flash forward to [how] shootings are portrayed today, the kind of claims about racial differences are a little less explicit, but what’s often done instead is that white perpetrators’ motives are frequently cast within a more forgiving light compared to Black perpetrators,” he said.

“When white people commit acts of violence, there can be a search for motive. When we compare this to shootings that are perpetrated by people of color, the motivations frequently aren’t nearly as sympathetic. There’s not quite as much of a focus on, say, a Black man’s mental health.”

Research has also shown that crime perpetrated by Black and brown people is overrepresented in news stories, whereas white people are more likely to be reported as people “addressing crime”, said Pamela Mejia, the director of research and the associate program director at Berkeley Media Studies Group. “The overwhelming media narrative reinforces the idea that only certain people commit crime, then makes it seem like [it is] much more of an outlier when an affluent, white-presenting person commits a crime,” she said. “Because, again, that’s just not seen as the norm, in part, by the very stories that the media tells us about ourselves.”

The coverage of Mangione, and other white men who commit violent acts, ultimately reaffirms who society thinks is capable of committing crime, said Richardson, reinforcing assumptions in the US that white people are less criminally inclined.

“There’s always the case of, when there’s a white man, trying to find the explanations for why this person committed the crime,” said Richardson. “There’s no criminalization or placing this person in the context of being a predator or a super predator. There’s always going to be some defining explanations of why this happened.”