Thread by @neonflag

So, @nprdina and @vicwj, ye of the three-naméd news reporters, we need to talk about this story.

I'm a writer in Atlanta. I have been covering political extremism here for about a decade. And I am horrified at the journalistic malpractice on display.

npr.org/sections/insur…

"Bruno Cua was best known in his small town of Milton, Ga., as a great builder of treehouses. These were big, elaborate creations with ladders and trapdoors and framed-out windows."

WHERE THE FUCK DID THIS COME FROM.

Milton, Ga. is one of the most affluent parts of Atlanta, if not America. The average household income is about $130,000 a year.

Bruno Cua's father is a vice president at Intercontinental Hotels and is likely in the $250,000+ a year range. Their house is worth about $750,000.

He is, to put it mildly, the child of Atlanta elites, in a part of the country with some of the starkest wealth inequality to be found.

And yet, your story manages to paint him as some suburban paintballer who makes treehouses in the local equivalent of Mayberry.

The VERY FIRST THING one sees when trawling through his social media -- relevant, given his Parler interactions -- are pictures of him with lots and lots of guns. Shotguns, but other stuff too.

Instead, we get this:

The PR team of the defense counsel - something a Black kid accused of a carjacking here would never have - handed you a sympathetic photo and you ran it. And you bought their bullshit -- WITHOUT ATTRIBUTION -- about "treehouses," too.

But this photo slides down the memory hole.

This is part and parcel of a long habit of "humanizing" white criminal suspects while demonizing Black suspects. It is obvious, noticed and shameful.