In 2014, while a student at Center Alternative School, Fredrick Demond Scott, now 22, threatened to “kill all white people.” He did not succeed, but the evidence strongly suggests he killed at least five, all middle-aged white men, four of whom were walking on or near the river trail system in South Kansas City.

Scott’s case sheds an unflattering light on many of the nation’s institutions beginning with the mainstream media. To its credit, the Kansas City Star has been slowly coming to grips with a story its editors would rather not cover, but the national mainstream media have taken no interest. Two days after the announcement of Scott’s arrest in what has all the appearance of a serial hate crime, seemingly confirmed by Scott’s documented threats, a Google search finds no mention of his name in any media outlet of consequence.

In the way of contrast, less than two days after the February shooting death of Srinivas Kuchibhotla at an Olathe bar, the New York Times was running a prominent story by one of its own reporters headlined, “Hate Crime Is Feared as 2 Indian Engineers Are Shot in Kansas.” A Google search of Olathe shooter “Adam Purinton” nets 192,000 hits.

The reason why the Times and other national media took such an interest in the shooting is embedded in this one paragraph: “The attack, which the federal and local authorities are investigating as a possible hate crime, reverberated far beyond both states. It raised new alarms about a climate of hostility toward foreigners in the United States, where President Trump has made clamping down on immigration a central plank of his ‘America first’ agenda.” Bingo.

The word “hate” does not so much appear in the Star’s most recent effort. “Police said they did not know if the shootings were racially motivated,” reports the Star. “[Prosecutor Jean Peters] Baker has said she saw no clear motive.” It would seem that the media could at least speculate on a motive when a man who has said he wants to kill all white people, then kills five people, all of them white.

Scott is clearly a troubled soul, but then again, so is Adam Purinton. A neighbor said of Purinton that he “never heard him make a racist remark or talk politics. He said he doesn’t believe the shooting stemmed from hatred, and that it likely resulted from Purinton’s physical and mental deterioration.”

Yet Purinton, like James Alex Fields (819.000 Google hits) in Charlottesville, is made to stand as a symbol of Trump’s America. Scott symbolizes nothing. He will disappear from the news before he ever enters it. This is the most damaging form of “fake news.” When the media elevate one story for political reasons and suppress another, they deform the national debate and intimidate would-be reformers. More immediately, they feed the unhinged rage of people as susceptible as Scott.