Main Character of the Week: Sonya Massey
Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week.
It’s Sonya Massey, the Illinois woman who was fatally shot by the police.
Viral bodycam footage of her death reverberated online this week. It sparked the sort of hashtag-driven online activism that’s been prevalent since 2012.
In it, Massey calls the police suspecting an intruder. The officers enter her Springfield home. They notice a pot of boiling water and fear that she will throw it on them. And so after a warning, a white deputy, Sean Grayson, shoots her in the face.
Her family has said that the 36-year-old was a paranoid schizophrenic. She seemed to threaten officers by telling them in her kitchen that she’ll “rebuke” them “in the name of Jesus.” But she begins to kneel with her hands up. As the Guardian reported this week:
“You better [expletive] not, I swear to God I’ll [expletive] shoot you right in your [expletive] face,” Grayson warned.
Massey can be heard saying, “I’m sorry,” as Grayson continues to advance. “I’m sorry,” she says again as Grayson fires three shots, striking her with a bullet below the eye that exited from the back of her neck.
“What else can we do?” Grayson asks his partner. “I’m not taking hot boiling water to the [expletive] face.”
Grayson is facing three charges of first-degree murder and remains in custody.
I’ve been an editor at the Daily Dot since 2014 and we’ve covered the hashtag activism tragedies about officer-involved shootings, one after the other.
From Trayvon Martin to George Floyd. Michael Brown. Freddie Gray. Breonna Taylor. Laquan McDonald. These are just the officer-involved shootings that I can immediately recall.
In 2020, the news was driven by the coronavirus, the presidential election, and Black Lives Matter protests. A year prior we’d introduced Americans to Karens, or irrationally angry white people who weaponized their fear by, say, calling the cops on a Black man who is bird-watching.
Yet we failed to cover the Massey news.
It’s my fault: Our web traffic comes chiefly from Google Discover. Its algorithm whitelists legacy, trusted news publishers like the Washington Post, the New York Times, Reuters, and Associated Press when it comes to world-shaking events.
So if we dedicate news resources to the Massey story, we’ll get no Discover traffic. All we can do is find side quest stories that serve as appetizers for the main news course. Like singer Solange tweeting about the tragedy.
But no, “celebrity tweets about tragedy” is a very 2014 story. It’s boring and we aren’t going to beat TMZ. Or entertainment publishers such as Vibe magazine, BET, and Yahoo. So the challenge is: Go deep on a big trending topic and find a scoop.
We didn’t search for one, to our news menu’s detriment.
This is likewise because, while the Trending news team has 27 active contributing reporters and 10 of them are Black women, our full-time team is thin, buried, and not diverse enough at the top. And also because the sad news left me, the managing editor with a decade of these stories under his belt, not feeling the urgency of the moment. Not because I was grief-stricken, which I remain, but because I didn’t see a path to clicks.
And that’s another tragedy: Americans are unsurprised by the statistics, cynical, and therefore less likely to care. Or write their elected officials a letter. Or share a link on Facebook.
I pledge to do better next time.
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