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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
The bigger news than the style guide(which, however dumb and offensive in the moment, is baked in) is that they refer to it as a ‘killing’ and not a murder. Nobody thinks stabbing random people to death, unprovoked, on the bus, is good. Everyone agrees this is a murder. They just won’t say it.
While it's often sounds ridiculous, the New York Times was at least relatively consistent about this regarding the 2020 happening and AFAICT eyeballing search results they didn't start calling it a murder until after the trial.
Probably some opinion articles that got away with the improper terminology, and I suspect many other outlets are less consistent on this.
With the 2020 case you could argue there was a lot more conjecture around cause of death and liability
IIRC at least some journalistic style guides recommend against calling a death "murder" unless a trial court has ruled it to be such. Otherwise it's just
spicy homicide"killing". There are ways to kill people that are merely manslaughter, and ways in which doing so with intent still not be considered a "murder" (self defense, the death penalty).It's relevant that they also generally say "accused" for libel reasons even when the case is expected to be pretty open-and-shut.
And of course it isn't technically a murder if the killer is legally insane - which is the scenario most likely to be relevant here.
While this is true, if black schizophrenics are (hypothetically, I don’t know if they are) vastly more likely to aim their paranoia and rage at white people than at black people, that seems to blur matters somewhat.
“This person is possessed by unstoppable rage that makes him hurt people.”
And
“This person is possessed by an unstoppable rage that makes him hurt people AND a racist hatred of whites that means he goes after them specifically.”
Seem to hit quite differently. Like if Dexter had gone after Indians rather than other serial killers.
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