The Minneapolis church shooting has reignited debate over how news outlets handle gender self-identification in reporting. While some prioritised empathy by affirming pronouns, others stressed accuracy by identifying biological sex. Drawing on Jung’s warning about the dangers of absolutising virtues, this blog argues that empathy without accuracy erodes trust, just as seen in the Casey Review. Public service media like the BBC risk collapse if audiences believe compassion is being used to obscure facts rather than inform truthfully.
The tragic shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, in which 23-year-old Robin Westman killed two children and injured seventeen others, has become a test case for how the media negotiates truth. While the facts were stark—Westman was biologically male, had legally changed their name, and identified as female—the reporting fractured along familiar lines. Some outlets adopted she/her pronouns, others avoided pronouns altogether, and law enforcement referred to Westman as male.
What did we learn from coverage of the Minneapolis child murders?
Certainly some grim lessons about legacy media, and almost nothing more.
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— SEEN in Journalism (@JournalismSEEN) August 29, 2025
As SEEN in Journalism argued in The Lessons of Minneapolis, the incident reveals how institutional newsrooms have come to treat gender self-identification as sacrosanct, even when it obscures clarity. The public is not being offered neutral reporting but a moralised narrative. By aligning with self-ID language, newsrooms frame empathy as the primary journalistic virtue. Yet, as Carl Jung warned, absolutising a virtue distorts its value. Compassion without balance becomes imperious; it erodes other goods, including justice and truth.
A battle between good and evil is easily won. You can slay the devil by the aid of all sorts of helpful ideas and institutions, public support. Everybody will shake your hand and congratulate you on having slain the dragon. But to slay another virtue is harder: there you gain no recognition. The just will say you are just, but others will say you have not been compassionate; and others will say, yes, you have been frank and honest yet you were not generous or compassionate. For if you are honest and believe in honesty you will speak the truth, and you will make a hell of a mistake: you will be cruel, tactless, unjust and you can have every vice under the sun. Just because you believe in that one virtue, you will have offended against all others (Jung, 1989, p. 435).
We have seen this pattern before. The Casey Review into rape-gangs concluded that officials downplayed the role of ethnicity out of fear of causing offence. The result was not safety but silence, not trust but mistrust. Survivors were disbelieved, communities polarised, and public confidence in institutions fell sharply. The same trajectory is visible in today’s media handling of gender identity in crime reporting.
When the BBC describes a male offender as a “wife,” or when American outlets avoid sex altogether in reporting on a mass shooter, the public reads this not as kindness but as obfuscation. People know when they are not being told the full story. Each evasion deepens suspicion that the press is colluding in a deception. And because the BBC and other public broadcasters operate only with public consent, their long-term survival depends on being perceived as accurate. If audiences conclude that empathy is being weaponised to deny reality, the legitimacy of these institutions will collapse.
The lessons are simple. The public needs the facts to make up its own mind. Journalism must respect that need by grounding itself in accuracy first, while acknowledging competing claims of empathy and identity. Jung saw the conflict of virtues as harder to resolve than the fight against evil, because it requires living with paradox. But evading the paradox by enforcing one-sided empathy is no solution.
If the media wants to retain trust, it must hold both virtues—accuracy and empathy—in tension, without sacrificing truth to sentiment. Otherwise, as The Lessons of Minneapolis makes plain, the public will walk away.