A video showing the murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on public transport in Charlotte, North Carolina, has sent shockwaves round the world. It has also reignited debate over the widening ideological gulf in news reporting. The video shows Zarutska sitting alone, scrolling her phone, while behind her Decarlos Williams, a 35-year-old black man with a long history of arrest and diagnosed schizophrenia, rises to his feet and swings a knife toward her unsuspecting neck.

The incident reached viral escape velocity when Elon Musk reposted a comment on X noting the dearth of coverage in progressive outlets, a media omertà that still largely holds at the time of writing. But this relative silence is perhaps unsurprising. Every detail of the incident cuts against the received progressive worldview, on so many angles and with so total an absence of confounding counter-narrative, that no Left-wing outlet could report on it without fearing its weaponisation by the Right, within the perennially sensitive topic of American race politics.

This unhappy subject could — and does — fill whole libraries, but is especially bitter where crime statistics are concerned. Debate over the reality, aetiology, and proper response to documented per-capita disparities in criminal violence between white and black Americans is itself too bottomless a source of partisan online discourse to be readily summarised. But this subject periodically bubbles up in the culture war: among other recent controversies, this topic shaped partisan interpretations of George Floyd’s death in 2020, the subsequent Black Lives Matter craze, efforts to “defund the police”, and ongoing debates over urban homelessness, drug use, and shoplifting.

Latterly, too, it provided the subtext to high-profile incidents such as the death of Jordan Neely, who was black, while restrained on a NYC subway by white military veteran Daniel Penny. Penny was later tried for homicide, and finally acquitted. It also fuelled public debate around the death by stabbing of 17-year-old high school athlete Austin Metcalf, who was white, by black fellow student Karmelo Anthony at a school athletics event.

In addition to alleging a racialised disparity in propensity to criminal violence, the Right also claims that the progressive press seeks methodically to report cases so as to invert this disparity. That such violence is preponderantly and unjustly perpetrated by white people, especially police officers, against black Americans, was the animating claim that drove the Black Lives Matter protests and subsequent calls to “defund the police”. In a similar vein, there are dozens of New York Times articles on the Daniel Penny trial, while I could find none on the death of Austin Metcalf.

It is hardly surprising, in this febrile context, that Zarutska’s murder has been so widely reported by Right-wing outlets, not just for its shocking brutality but also as an example of this media bias in action. The victim’s slenderness, youth and prettiness makes her the perfect martyr. Nor should we be surprised that the progressive press has struggled to frame the attack. Unlike the Daniel Penny incident, there is no ambiguity over what happened: the video shows an unprovoked and senseless attack on a defenceless lone white woman by a black man with a knife. Worse still, the victim isn’t even the privileged white woman of progressive demonology, but a refugee who, in a different context, would automatically elicit progressive protective instincts.

Putting all this together, there is simply no obvious way to make her murder intelligible within American race politics in a way that does not serve Right-wing narratives. It thus appears that those outlets which most zealously oppose such narratives have either not registered it as having occurred, or opted not to report it.

The world is full of stories, and no publication can document them all. But the difficulty today is that all such selection mechanisms now coexist online, in readily searchable form; anyone who so wishes can toggle back and forth between perspectives, and draw their own conclusions about how, and from what ingredients, the sausage of “news” is made. For those who set any stock at all in the need for a polity to inhabit an at least somewhat shared reality, this is not a reassuring picture.

Especially in the age of viral AI slop, no one should celebrate or seek to hasten the disintegration of a shared reality or commitment to truth in the media. Notwithstanding any putative political bias, my sense is that this is well understood across the legacy press, including the progressive side. Such outlets would do well to consider that a reputation for objectivity turns not just on how a story is reported but also if it is — especially where a story challenges comfortable ideological narratives.