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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 see the logic, but it also still doesn't make sense to me. "Republicans pounce" is a well-trodden meme at this point, and using such phrasing signals partisanship that discredits themselves and whatever article is under the headline. Anyone who's been paying attention to US politics and journalism - which should include literally every American journalist writing about Republicans - should be fully aware of this. As such, if I were a cynical partisan Democrat journalist editing a headline, I would make sure to avoid any phrase that has any similarities with this meme, knowing that any such similarities would make my mission of manipulating people into buying into my framing and narrative less likely to succeed.
Now, some might say that these journalists are in echo chambers that prevent them from recognizing how they discredit themselves. Seems reasonable, but this also doesn't escape the same problem as above: everyone knows that everyone is susceptible to echo chambers that are invisible to them. And, again, US journalists who cover US politics should be more aware of this than the typical person. As such, a US journalist should at the very least be highly suspicious that they live in an echo chamber, which means that they're less capable of analyzing and reporting the news credibly to the populace in general, which means they're less capable of manipulating them. Or informing them properly, if you're an honest, good-faith operator. As such, a selfish, cynical, partisan journalist would (and certainly a non-cynical, non-partisan one would) try to gain perspectives from outside their echo chambers, thus allowing them to understand how damning anything similar to "Republicans pounce" is to their credibility.
And yet we see the line - sometimes verbatim - trotted out regularly. It appears as the mirror image of the "Democrats are the real racists" (DRRR) meme, which the left has already developed antibodies for, and as such, just serves to discredit the speaker for playing into their hand.
I'm reminded of the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog far too often these days.
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