Anti-Trans Violence Only Received 48 Minutes of Media Coverage in 2022
Despite widespread anti-transgender violence in 2022, the news media spent less than an hour covering it.The only exception was the Club Q massacre, which gained news primarily because it was a mass shooting that claimed five lives, rather than Club Q’s connection to the LGBTQ community.According to a new analysis by Media Matters for America, a liberal-leaning media watchdog group, major cable and broadcast networks spent just over 6 hours reporting on anti-transgender violence, which claimed 38 lives in the United States in 2022.However, the overwhelming majority of that coverage — 91%, or 5 hours and 12 minutes — was focused on the Club Q massacre, in which two of the victims were transgender.Additionally, due to the timing of the attack, which happened near the end of the calendar year, in November 2022, for more than 10 months, coverage of anti-transgender violence on major TV networks was, at best, scant, if not absent altogether.The remaining 48 minutes of coverage aired on one network, MSNBC, and were split into eight segments, despite the higher number of victims — 36 in total.Additionally, unlike the two Club Q transgender victims, who were white, the majority of transgender or gender-nonconforming individuals were Black or Latinx women, highlighting the disparities that can exist in media coverage of violence based on the identities of victims. “Media networks have a track record of fixating on individual tragedies that provide opportunities for sensationalized coverage rather than drawing earnest attention to the stark reality of violence against marginalized people in America,” Media Matters wrote in its report. “This can give the impression that violence against trans people is isolated rather than an