When someone with vaguely right-wing views shoots up a public place, the New York Times dedicates hundreds of words to any plausible connection between the shooting and Republican politicians. When the shooter has vaguely left-wing views, it seems the New York Times does what it can to obscure the shooter’s views.
Here is the lead of the New York Times’s story on this week’s Brooklyn subway shooter suspect:
“The suspect in Tuesday’s subway attack in Brooklyn appears to have posted dozens of videos on social media in recent years — lengthy rants in which he expressed a range of harshly bigoted views and, more recently, criticized the policies of New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.”
“A range of harshly bigoted views” and criticism of Adams is one way to describe the suspect’s posts. It’s not the way you would describe it if you wanted to inform your readers of his views. It almost sounds like an active effort to avoid informing your readers that the suspect’s views were aligned with left-wing causes.
The story goes into more detail further down.
“In a video posted to YouTube on March 1, the person featured in the video criticized Mr. Adams for recently announced policies addressing public safety in the subways, which focused on homeless people.”
These are sentences you would write if you were steadfastly avoiding letting your readers know what the suspect had to say on these topics.
For instance, here is what the suspect has said: “These white motherf***ers, this is what they do,” he said. “Ultimately, at the end of the day, they kill and commit genocide against each other. What do you think they gonna do to your black ass?”
He also said, “It’s just a matter of time before these white motherf***ers decide, ‘Hey listen. Enough is enough. These [N-words] got to go.”
So, he’s a racist who hates white people and believes white people are out to kill black people. That’s an easy thing to say, but the New York Times story avoided saying it.
Three years ago, when a white man opened fire at an El Paso Walmart, the New York Times handled it very differently.
“El Paso Shooting Suspect’s Manifesto Echoes Trump’s Language” was the headline.
The story focuses on the overlap between the El Paso shooter’s views and then-President Donald Trump’s
“If Mr. Trump did not originally inspire the gunman, he has brought into the mainstream polarizing ideas and people once consigned to the fringes of American society,” the New York Times concluded in a lengthy piece blaming all sorts of hate crimes on Trump.
