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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
There are so many threads to this murder to tug. Like how somehow the judges that let all these criminals go are all black women without law degrees? Because apparently you don't need one to serve as a judge in North Carolina? And the one that specifically let this guy free without bail runs a halfway house she pockets taxpayer money with by sending the criminals she releases under her authority as a judge there? How the council of black women that run the city have a history of embezzling COVID funds, and threw a birthday party in the middle of discussing the murder. How this murder occurred on a bus full of black people and not one single person who saw it happen helped her. Although in the grand scheme of things it took about 90 seconds for a black man to run back and attempt to apply pressure to the wounds about as well as you could hope an amateur would. So at least someone tried to do something.
Long long ago, in a more naive time, on a different site, on a different account, I compared Obama's border policies to a hypothetical scenario where all the jails just decided "Fuck you, you aren't allowed to criticize us, we're going to dump all the criminals back on you." It seemed so unthinkable at the time. Such absurd hyperbole. Alas.
Charitably everything about this case is a scathing indictment of Democrat rule. More accurately, it proves 4chan and Scott Adams were right.
Edit: Sources as best I can.
Tiawana Brown, Charlotte Councilwoman, used COVID funds for birthday party
Charlotte City Council being almost entirely black and majority female
RE: None of the black people who saw the attack helped her, just watch the 7 minute video of her dying
Stokes and her wife run a halfway house where the criminals she releases receive "treatment" at the taxpayer expense
I'm tagging this post as borderline low-effort for the lack of links, which nudge it toward "weak man" territory. Assuming you've characterized the facts accurately, the post itself is basically fine, but I'm not going to go link hunting to chase down every single one of these claims to determine whether you're identifying sufficiently narrow groups, being sufficiently charitable, etc.
So basically, more effort than this please: bring evidence in proportion to how badly the facts seem to reflect on the group(s) under discussion.
I mean, the problem is, because of the reporting blackout and the "Republicans Pounce" narrative, it's all twitter threads. It's that sufficient?
Yes, your edit is definitely sufficient.
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Do the tweets have receipts? I mean, I assume there is some external evidence that e.g. North Carolina has criminal trial judges without law degrees, a public list (and maybe photograph) of all the members of the relevant "council of black women," etc.
Linking to a bunch of people just saying stuff on Twitter is not any better than just saying stuff here. But "amateur" journalism from Twitter users is fine, provided they are doing something recognizably journalistic, like linking sources, posting credible video evidence, etc. Randos doing journalism on Twitter are at least as good as those working for the New York Times (and often twice as honest!).
Do you have a source on that?
Source?
A source. I need a source.
Sorry, I mean I need a source that explicitly states your argument. This is just tangential to the discussion.
No, you can't make inferences and observations from the sources you've gathered. Any additional comments from you MUST be a subset of the information from the sources you've gathered.
You can't make normative statements from empirical evidence.
Do you have a degree in that field?
A college degree? In that field?
Then your arguments are invalid.
No, it doesn't matter how close those data points are correlated. Correlation does not equal causation.
Correlation does not equal causation.
CORRELATION. DOES. NOT. EQUAL. CAUSATION.
You still haven't provided me a valid source yet.
Nope, still haven't.
I just looked through all 308 pages of your user history, figures I'm debating a Glormpf supporter. A moron.
@WhiningCoil edited links into the comment. I clicked a few. They seem basically adequate to me, and I appreciated the effort of their addition. Your copypasta has no power here.
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You appear to be making an argument that demands for citation are being used as, as another commenter put it, a filibuster against evidence other commenters don't want to look at. This may be so, and this is in fact the behavior your pasta is meant to highlight, but it seems to me that these are in fact inflammatory claims, that the citations should in fact be provided, and that while some here might be trying to filibuster in this manner, the user you are responding to is not, and it has drawn a number of reports.
We have a rule about proactively providing evidence for inflammatory claims. We also have a rule against low-effort engagement, which copypasta certainly is, and in fact your last warning was for copypasta. Your warning/AAQC ratio is about 3:1, not horrifying, but not great either. I am giving you a one-day ban; please read the rules posted at the top of the page and in the sidebar, and make an effort to understand and follow them. If you disagree with what you see here, just say so. You're allowed to do that. You are not allowed to do this.
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How about you just let the man contribute to the discussion with context instead of hassling him like this is wikipedia.
Everything he mentioned I already knew, and had read about. If you don't want to be neck-deep in the culture war, then so be it, but this has been topic #1 for at least the last two days, and it came late to the motte, so it's not surprising that somebody posts like we might have others who are up to date.
He even followed the rules by not posting it at the top level and keeping it to a reply.
And furthermore, he's absolutely right. The communists spare the criminals every day because their enemy is the kulak, the everyman, and people like DeCarlos are their footsoldiers.
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