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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   41234 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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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

Whatever you think of the style guide, they shouldn't change it for one story.

If it's bad for one story, and it should be consistent for every story, then...

I, for one, would be happy if they got rid of their racially-biased capitalization. I can't even point to this story as the basis of my opinion, as I thought it was bullshit politicization from the first time I heard of it.

A political organization should stop using tools that favor its own side, because it sometimes needs to make subtle exceptions to better serve its cause?

Here's my recommendation: Stop treating political actors as neutral service providers. Newspapers, nowadays, are not apolitical stewards of information for the benefit of the public.

Why not advocate for newspapers to be better?

I like it when news organisations lean more into their 'present the facts' mode, even if they can never be (and have never been) truly neutral.

Because making them better is against the Geneva Suggestions?

This might be a question of personality, but I think they defected a little too hard to deserve any more trust. Newspaperem delendam esse. At least the central nodes, the big papers and publishers and all those who work for them, shouldn't be trusted anymore, because any return to neutrality would most likely be a short-lived survival measure, with a certain snap back into ideological mode as soon as they think they can get away with it. They're still the same people after all, and even if the changing times force them to be a little more demure, it won't change what they think and believe.

Does that imply you think there are some more smaller, neutral, non-ideological, trustworthy news orgs waiting in the wings? Perhaps I take the lesson of 'no one is neutral' as a more fundamental one.

There are some "news orgs" that explicitly make it their mission statement to be politically neutral, like Ground News and Allsides, but those are news aggregators, not reporters.

As for actual newspapers, doing their own research and writing their own stories without political bias - there should be some. Surely they can't all be bad apples. There must be some reporters reporting for reporting's sake, somewhere, who aren't deliberately selecting stories to serve some narrative.

But yes, if in doubt, mistrust and the assumption of ideological capture seem safer bets.

As for actual newspapers, doing their own research and writing their own stories without political bias - there should be some. Surely they can't all be bad apples.

The existence of newspapers which seek to avoid political bias (except for the pro-establishment bias that comes from the need to cultivate sources and any bias which comes from seeking sensationalism) is the result of a temporary and somewhat unusual situation in the American advertising market in the second half of the twentieth century. Founding era newspapers wore their partisan bias on their sleeves, as did the Hearst era yellow press. So does the press in most other countries - the only British paper that isn't proud of its political slant is the Financial Times.

The truth-forming function of the press is best delivered by ideological diversity, not by hoping that a journalistic monoculture is unbiased. The problem here is that you need your partisan journalists to be journalists first and partisan second (as, for example, Rupert Murdoch and his news outlets always have been) or else you end up with Pravda and Infowars shouting at each other.

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