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Last week I wrote about the NYT’s coverage of the Minneapolis school shooting, where the headline and article repeatedly used “Ms.” and “her” for the shooter, Robin Westman. That may follow their style guide, but in the context of a mass killing, it reads less like neutral reporting and more like ideological signaling. The pronouns end up being the story, while two murdered children fade into the background.
Now there’s the coverage of the truly awful video released of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death on a Charlotte train. There are familiar editorial fingerprints from the ‘style guide’. The NYT capitalizes “Black” but leaves “white” lowercase. Elon Musk pointed this out and it’s getting traction. This is a policy shift the NYT, AP, and others made in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing, with the reasoning that “Black” marks shared cultural identity, while capitalizing “White” risks feeding white-identity politics.
That may be defensible as a policy, but applied in a case where a Black suspect kills a white victim, it lands as bias whether intended or not. The style guide twice now ends up louder than the tragedy itself.
When editorial rules like these are applied without reflection, they pull focus from the human story. It truly makes me upset because these were horrific events. There’s no reason to show off your liberal bona fides at all. Just show compassion for the victims and don’t preemptively build up scaffolding for when it will be used as culture war fuel.
Frankly, I think that articles like this make race relations in America worse. I don’t think that the killing has anything to do with race, at all. It’s about violence in America, which is so insanely out of control. I think cloaking it in platitudes about decreasing crime rate stats also shows how scared of second-order effects news organizations are.
I read a book recently about the history of imprisonment in Texas. It talks about restorative justice and prison labor etc. I don’t know what else you’re supposed to do besides reassure the public that this man (or anyone inflicting evil on others) will never see the light of day again
What if the media just drops the mask and starts explicitly praising murders like this, explicitly calling for a race war to exterminate or enslave whites, etc?
That’s not what’s happening here, and framing it that way just muddies the waters. The New York Times isn’t openly cheering murder or calling for race war. What they are doing is applying style guide rules (pronouns, capitalization) without reflection, in ways that overshadow the violence itself.
When they ideological signal while reporting on tragedies, they hand critics easy ammunition. That’s how we end up with Musk’s tweet going viral. It validates the narrative of media bias and feeds this weird anachronism that’s emerged.
If you actually want to stop the slide into complete culture war, the solution isn’t imagining the NYT as genocidal propagandists. You should instead demand they show restraint and focus on the victims (and leave their signaling to op eds and trump bad stories).
The "style guide rule" is an ideological commitment to racial hierarchy.
They also applied their style guide to a quote, which seems completely inappropriate. Dinesh D'Souza did not capitalize either word. NYT version:
There used to be a time where I thought newspapers would be forced to either do something like:
or:
Of course, there's no enforcement mechanism. Only putting direct quotes between quotation marks isn't a fundamental law of the universe, after all, and nobody cares about those standards of precision.
fakeEdit: and if they were just correcting grammar, then they should have added a comma after "Of course...", so it's not an evenhanded application of their standards.
See also the CBC, here: They omitted "...of Alberta..." from their quote of the referendum question because it flows better and they don't care about precision.
Style guides vary, but maximal precision in quotes, er, string literals is the domain of software engineers. The Jargon File has some relevant pithy quotes:
For example, the American convention is to move punctuation to within quotation marks. It probably capitalizes without annotation the first word of a sentence even if it was quoted from within a sentence. I can see a weak argument for "correcting" capitalization from a written quote: if it was said aloud, it'd have been ambiguous anyway.
Maximal precision in string literals is referring to a different type of precision. To a software engineer, this sentence is incorrect:
The phrase "my quotation" is the same as "my quotation."
because a period is either part or not part of a string and those two options aren't the same string.
But this sentence is fine:
The quotation "I'm making the point that [X] via a careful logical application of [point Y], and [point Z]" can be summarized as "Y and Z imply X".
because quotation marks are how you indicate that something is a single string variable (a noun phrase, essentially) whose internals have no syntactic impact externally. IMHO it's actually pretty annoying that there's no clean universal English-language way to do this. Often you can get away with punctuation to delimit a phrase if you reword the sentence a little, or you can use a hyphenated-compound-word if it's short enough and if it's needed as disambiguation (which it isn't in this sentence; the rule is so non-universal that I'm already breaking it here), but there's nothing as clean as the programming rule: wrap it in these delimiters and you're done. (Isn't that colon so much more annoying than quotation marks would have been there?)
To an American journalist (and to most non-journalist normies, honestly), the first sentence is fine (it's just using the "typesetters' quotation" rule, common in America, for how commas and periods interact with quotation marks) and the second is wrong (because quotation marks around text are "to identify it as a quotation, direct speech or a literal title or name"), not just a mere paraphrase, unless the paraphrase is also marked via brackets. It's not that journalism is supposed to be less precise, it's just that it's supposed to be following a different set of rules.
I've spent most of my life writing software for fun and for school and for a living, and I frequently have to fix it when I catch myself slipping up (or get caught by others while slipping up) in just this way when writing English, and although I probably fail to catch myself even more often I'm at least trying. I feel that someone who went into the humanities in school and writes English for a living and doesn't have a half dozen incompatible computer languages twisting their brain and does have an editor trying to catch their slip-ups can be fairly held to the same standard.
Moreover, in these cases we're not even talking about misquotations where the rules disagree! Omitting a phrase like "of Alberta" would be incorrect by both journalistic and programmers' rules - the use of quotation marks is fine by programmer's rules, but the semantic meaning of the sentence including it is false! That's even worse! Errors which fail to compile are much better than errors that compile but then give you the wrong results!
I'm still happy (by which I mean persuaded and unhappy) with my theory that technological/economic devastation of newsroom employment means we're now stuck getting our news from people who make bad life choices.
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I wish fully logical quotation was the standard; I should be able to say something like "He said 'the sky is blue.'.". But I'd just look like a retard.
Say, speaking of the Jargon File, ESR has his own take on this incident.
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In theory, there is an enforcement mechanism: D'Souza could sue them for defamation, on the basis that his brand was damaged by NYT quoting him as using their style guide (since his fanbase considers said style guide an enemy identifier). I'm not sure he'd succeed, but the threat of such suits is a good chunk of why quotes are/were sacrosanct.
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