Objective coverage also a casualty
Revulsion of shootings directed at news outlets
NEW YORK — Revulsion over the weekend’s twin mass shootings and the nagging sense that it’s all an inconclusive rerun has frustrated the news media and those who rely on it.
In addition, it has triggered the stirrings of a new debate over how such tragedies should be covered. “It’s time for journalists to take sides,” tweeted prominent Columbia University professor Bill Grueskin, and he’s not just a voice in the wilderness.
News outlets haven been dominated by coverage of the shootings, which killed 31 people in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. Editors at The New York Times discovered the extent to which nerves are frayed when they put together the newspaper’s Tuesday edition.
The first edition’s lead headline, “TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM,” provoked a social media backlash. Some tweeters said they canceled subscriptions in disgust.
“Let this front page serve as a reminder of how white supremacy is aided by — and often relies upon — the cowardice of mainstream institutions,” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasiocortez wrote in a tweet.
The newspaper called the headline flawed and changed it to “ASSAILING HATE BUT NOT GUNS” in later editions and online.
Similarly, The Associated Press got online criticism for using the phrase “mass shootings” to refer to the carnage, with some readers suggesting “murder” was more appropriate. The news service’s rules forbid usage of the word murder unless an assailant was convicted of a crime.
Fox News’ Shepard Smith wearily captured the impotence of the bynowrote response to each mass shooting.
“We hear you,” he told viewers in an essay that opened his show Monday. “We heard you the last time. And the time before that, and we will likely do it all soon, yet again in America.”
For Lucy Dalglish, dean of the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, it was working with surviving journalists from the Capital Gazette after the 2018 attack that killed staff members at the Annapolis, Virginia, newspaper that led her to question her old assumptions.
For generations, journalism students have been told to check their feelings at the door when it’s time to work, she said. “It’s becoming tougher and tougher to do that,” Dalglish said, “because the way we’re covering this doesn’t seem to matter anymore.”