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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
You are making the pronouns an issue. Would it be any less ideological if the NYT abandoned their style guide, just this once?
I think there is certainly a case to be made that following these kind of style changes are more ideological than abstaining from their use because they are fundamentally prescriptive rather than descriptive. It was not the common use of English speech in America or anywhere else to refer to males as she/her should they wish to identify as such, and neither was it common use to capitalize Black. Calling a human male he or a person of predominantly African ethnicity black is not some conscious political choice. Choosing to do otherwise, and beyond that making it an institutional requirement to do so, is what is ideological (for better or worse).
Yes you can argue that choosing not to rebel against convention is just as political a choice as doing what everyone else does yada yada yada but I think this misses the point, besides being needless sophistry. When describe things as being "political", they mean that the action in question done was with deliberate intent to make some kind of rhetorical or political point. Failing to try to make a point, or not even conceiving of your speech as political at all, is obviously inherently less "political" in nature.
I like to say that even if you must insist that a chocolate chip cookie recipe is just as political as, say, Das Kapital, you must at least be able to recognize that they are political to vastly differing extents.
That’s an argument for choosing a different style guide, not for abandoning it when the subject is sufficiently grim.
It also assumes that the NYT does not, in fact, believe the underlying premise. I don’t think this is obvious. If it were, though, why should they break kayfabe for this? Is it somehow more compassionate?
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