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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 stood out to me the most in that article was that it was, "Republicans Pounce". The style guide is dumb, but that's sort of baked in at this point. It's almost mechanical, like if someone changed their spellchecker. Whereas making the affirmative choice to headline with "Republicans Pounce" requires more in-the-moment intent.
I mean, I can see the logic, from their perspective. They think Trump is Hitler 2.0 and that he and his supporters are drooling at the thought of an excuse to massacre all the blacks. I read the article (or at least, what I can see of it before the paywall) as saying "OH SHIT, Reichstag Fire Decree incoming", which if true would legitimately be much-bigger news than a murder.
The issue is that the premises they're working from are highly-exaggerated, making it quite unlikely that there actually will be a Reichstag Fire Decree (or Nuremberg Laws, etc.).
I think the slightly easier steelman would be riffing off your phrase "much-bigger news than a murder". That is, one might think that this is "just a murder". Murders happen all the time. They're often not Paper of Record material. So the steelman view could be something like, "This wouldn't be Paper of Record news if it wasn't for Republicans Pouncing to try to make it news."
Of course, this still exposes some significant premises. One could have taken a similar view for several other cases that became cause celebres mostly due to the left "pouncing". It takes more time and effort to work through some reasoning for why any given incident is "legitimately" newsworthy versus primarily being pushed for political concerns. Nevertheless, the most basic observation that is difficult to explain away is that I can't really remember any incident being reported with the opposite valence. That is, I don't think there are stories presented in the form, "This wouldn't really be news if it wasn't for the fact that the left is 'pouncing'." Their concerns just are; they're inherently just and true; there is no intermediate agent actively choosing to pump up the situation for political purposes.
But all these sorts of observations require realizing the possibility and then having sufficient time/exposure to realize what's happening, which is more sophisticated than most observers are likely to be.
Whether a story is a "pounce" comes down to whether the story actually instantiates a larger problem. That's the rub, isn't it? The left and right don't agree which problems are a big deal, or even which ones are real.
Oh, I do this all the time. My reaction to every police anti-black brutality story of the last decade has been to think of those perfidious Chinese cardiologists. To wit, okay, maybe the cop went too far in this or that story. Maybe. But the problem you (progressive journalist) are implying to be pervasive is actually a freak event. Yes you can supply a lot of anecdotes, but that's only because we're a massive country. And your talking about that freak event is causing riots and lax policing leading to preventable deaths, so actually, your complaining is the problem here.
I suppose this is also what Blueskyers mean when they mock Republicans for being afraid of riding buses or what not. "The problem you (NY Post journalist) are implying to be pervasive is actually a freak event." And they think Republicans talking about this freak event is leading to racism, which is a Real Problem.
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