The question reverberating through news rooms throughout Canada (and perhaps around the world) today is – what is newsworthy? As a practicing journalist with a diploma in Journalism and decades (sigh) of experience I am pondering this today.

While this is a question that is asked everyday by journalists in many ways, today the question takes on special significance due to the recent mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.

Specifically, is it newsworthy to report on and/or focus/fixate in on the fact that the shooter was a member of the transgender community?

Well, the first thing journalists will do is look at the history of responsible news organizations as it relates to reporting about mass shootings.

What do we know:

Well we know that 98 percent of mass shootings are pepetrated by men. We know that when news agencies report on the perpetrators they follow a very specific formula – John Smith, a 38-year-old male resident of Fiction Town, Canada was convicted of…

In this we see that gender is reported. Why? Mostly because this is the way we have always reported. We want to know things like name, age, gender, place of residence etc. Following this we report details of the incident.

In this tradition a news agency might report the Tumbler Ridge story along the following lines:

“RCMP have released the identity of the suspect in yesterday’s tragic mass shooting in Tumber Ridge, B.C. as 18-year-old woman Jesse Van Rootselaar…etc.”

You will notice this is not how most news agencies are reporting this. There is an addendum to the identity – they mention that Van Rootselaar was a transgender person born as a biological male.

When you see this you know that journalists have decided that the nature of this person’s gender is newsworthy. By choosing to make it so they have implicitly decided that transgender women are not women. What they are saying is they were/potentially are men who identify as women. This distinction is very important. It suggests that news agencies and journalists are not certain where transgender people lie on the male/female/other spectrum of gender identity.

If you were to ask the transgender community they would say that trans-men are men and trans-women are women. In this instance the reporting should simply state that Rootselaar was a woman and leave it at that. But clearly journalism is struggling with this, not unlike others.

Is it newsworthy? It depends. If I were writing a story about the mass shooting I would simply state that Rootselaar was a woman and continue on with the facts of the story. However, myself or a peer would likely have to write another story about how the specifics of the gender of Rootselaar have become a focal point of politicians, people in general and the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. In this sense the nature of her gender becomes newsworthy and one would then write in more detail that Rootselaar’s having identified as a trans-woman has become a focal point of a different story.

Journalism has a resposnibility to report truth. But truth can be slippery because as much as we want it to be objective it is often coloured by human experience, the state of science as relates the subject and much more. Truth can be evasive and bias is everywhere.

I guarantee you that in newsrooms across the country journalists are wrestling with this right now. They are arguing and point/counter-pointing one-another in an effort to determine the most responsible way to report this.

One journalist will say “what if the shooter had red hair…is this relevant? Should we always be pointing out when red-haired people commit mass shootings to the detriment of red haired people everywhere?” To which another would respond “of course not but historically we have always reported gender…” to which the original says “fine – then we report that an 18-year-old woman just perpetrated one of Canada’s worst mass shootings…” and the argument continues.

Part of the discussion is an analysis of bias. Journalists try to be as unbiased as possible…this is the goal. We do not want our stories to contribute to increased bias in society. The question then would be – does adding the fact that Van Rootselaar is a trangender person reflect a bias on the part of the journalist/editorial process when reporting a basic news story about the shooting?

Well, as much as some news agencies want to avoid “choosing the facts” or falling onto one side or another of a currently debated cultural topic it cannot be avoided here. If you report that the suspect is a woman then you have decided that for news purposes a trans-woman is a woman. You have support here in that government policy and law in Canada largely say this and so it would be a reasonable choice.

If you report that the suspect is a woman but was born a biological male you have made a choice to subjugate trans-women to a lesser or different category than cis-women because it is not evidently relevant to the immediate story of the mass shooting (although as we discussed earlier it may become relevant in a more specific story focused on the trans community etc.).

Finally, if you choose to ignore the RCMP’s release that the suspect was an 18-year-old woman and zero in on there reference to the person being trans during a press conbference Q&A and report that it was a man, than you have most definitely shown significant bias in your reporting.

Whatever the case this and similar questions are important to ask, especially in newsrooms.