“Cases of Black people found hanged in the US South are a reminder of nation’s lynching history,” read an ABC News headline last month. That phrase – “lynching” – has been used again and again in reporting on the death of a woman in Mississippi. The Associated Press used the word, as did the British state broadcaster the BBC, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.

You may think, with such a loaded phrase, that the suspects are members of the KKK. In fact, all three are black men, charged with the murder of Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old woman found dead on August 3 in Jackson. Fortune’s own mother has said that she doesn’t believe the killing was motivated by race.

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You would hardly know it from the media’s coverage. One BBC report on Fortune’s death cited Mississippi’s “dark history of racial violence and lynchings” and claimed the incident “left the [black] community concerned that racial violence in Mississippi could be on the rise again,” despite “the absence of concrete details about the case.” Her death, Newsweek reported, “sparked nationwide attention because the circumstances recalled Mississippi’s long history of racial terror lynchings.”

The BBC story quoted progressive Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett, Brandon King, a prominent civil rights activist, and Kenneth Stokes, a Mississippi Democrat, who all suggested there was a racial element to Fortune’s death. Another BBC story mentioned........

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