How ISIS Weaponized Our Media

The media frenzy that followed in the wake of those first reports was inevitable and, to an extent, justified. A gunman with pro-ISIS leanings murdering dozens of people in a Florida nightclub deserves to take over the news agenda. Yet there’s another sense in which portrayals of the attack—wherein, at least when it first came to light, Mateen’s supposed ideological association set the frame—played directly into ISIS’s hands. Before the caliphate’s media team had even uttered a word, the organization was handed credit for the massacre as reports emerged that the killer had expressed support for it—an act that evokes dark hints of a worldwide conspiracy, even though it requires no genuine ties to the caliphate in Iraq and Syria.