Update:
Following the deaths of Alison Parker and Adam Ward, ABC News was sent a manifesto from Flanagan that details the racial motivations behind his actions.
“The church shooting was the tipping point…but my anger has been building steadily,” Flanagan writes.
“I’ve been a human powder keg for a while…just waiting to go BOOM!!!!”.
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Breitbart News Network, a conservative politics site, came under fire on Tuesday after spinning the murder of two colleagues in media into a political spectacle.
Reporting on the tragic on-camera murders of 24-year-old Alison Parker and 27-year-old Adam Ward, a reporter and cameraman for WDBJ in Roanoke, Virginia, Breitbart led with the headline, “RACE MURDER IN VIRGINIA.”
Parker and Ward were killed by Vester Lee Flanagan, aka Bryce Williams, a former colleague at WDBJ who filmed their murders. His Twitter account alludes to some racial tension, where he says Parker made racist comments.
Flanagan is black, while both Parker and Ward are white.
“BLACK REPORTER SUSPECTED OF MURDERING WHITE COLLEAGUES,” Breitbart writes.
Rather than treating the news story with any reverence to the victims, Breitbart turned the murders into a political issue capitalizing on ongoing racial tensions in the country.
Social media turned its head towards the publication, as countless users were left aghast at what they had just read.
“So, can all of us political folks stop pretending that Breitbart has any place in the mainstream discourse now?” Hunter Walker of Business Insider tweeted.
Some users chose to point out the deep hypocrisy within Breitbart’s editorial direction, noting that their coverage of Dylann Roof’s shooting of a black church in South Carolina, did not carry the same racial inflections. Basically saying it’s a race war when the shooter is black, but not when he is white.
