Fucking NY Times (and WaPo assholes)

angry conan obrien GIF by Team Coco

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Many mass shootings are still reported the same way.

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Good for the goose

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Best practice is to ignore the headline, and just read the story. I guess force of habit prevents them from saying “Eric Adams lies”.

The Mayor of New York has weighed in on this?

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head:" Adams Blames Bail Law After Release of Teen Charged in Officer Shooting"

subhead:“Other elected officials and a lawyer for the teenage defendant disputed Mayor Eric Adams’s characterization of the law’s role in the case”

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Bloody Sunday?

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oh, right, the other thing.

Given that “unfolding” has been used to described everything from military battles, to war crimes, to mass murders why would it raise eyebrows? It’s a clichĂ©.

Sure dude.

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It’s a CLICHE that is regularly invoked to cover over crimes, dude. Why is that acceptable to you?

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TIL - words don’t matter. :woman_shrugging:

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Words have meaning. Language is important. The shitty headlines the NYT barfs out there on these tragic events affect how their readers perceive them.

Just because you personally ignore them, doesn’t negate the societal harm of passive-voicing crimes against humanity.

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Especially not when Irish lives are on the line
 :roll_eyes:

seth meyers GIF by Late Night with Seth Meyers

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rummaging through 20th century google books, I have seen “unfolding gunfire” to describe

The Mai Lai massacre
The Kent State shootings
Various military battles
Charles Whitman shooting at Texas

It sounds like you agree with everyone else on this thread that the media usage of ‘unfold’ with regard to dangerous shootings is a long-standing and serious problem.

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Your point? That a passive voice SHOULD be used, because they didn’t shoot important people?

The reason why people are using passive voice is because they agree that people protesting state violence, or people of color, etc, etc should be the victims of state violence. It’s letting the state off the hook for their crimes against humanity
 or in the last case, those committed by a white man, who should always be given teh benefit of the doubt, apparently, when engaged in a mass shooting.

The construction of the sentence IS THE PROBLEM HERE. Full stop. It white washes particular kinds of violence in a way that normalizes it, and allows it to continue.

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This sounds like an excellent discussion to have in a pub in Derry.

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The article says that 13 people died; and yet the article mentions only Bernard McGuigal, Gerald Donaghey, Gerard McKinney, and Jackie Duddy. That’s the greater omission in my book. The article does seem to rely on the passive voice throughout to an almost excessive degree, but perhaps I have been primed to think so.

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Really? Then pretending that the British government is innocent of their deaths?

[ETA] I mean
 this was just posted in another thread (by @anon33932455)


This kind of language usage helps to exonerate particular people (like police, white men, US soldiers, and British paratroopers and the UK government in this particular case) from crimes that they commit. It embeds the idea that state sponsored violence is okay, because it’s keeping the “good” people safe from the “bad” people. These sorts of grammar constructions should be opposed for the work that they do at excusing forms of oppression, such as the obvious civil rights violations of Catholics in Northern Ireland until the good friday accords.

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Bugbear tangent: technically, it’s not a passive voice construction.

The Passive Voice is a thing, where the normal object of a verb is made the subject, and the subject is either abstracted away, or moved out into an oblique case. So “I hit him” is put into the passive “He is hit”, and either the actor is dropped or has to be added back as “by me”.

In “gunfire unfolded”, this is an active voice. The subject is “gunfire”, the verb is “to unfold”. The passive voice would be "gunfire was unfolded*. Which makes it more clear what the point of it all is, and what we’re all upset about: the point is to eliminate agency. The gunfire just sort of happened, and it may or may not have been in the vicinity of British paras and peaceful protesters. The point is to hide the agency of the paras. In this case, putting it into the passive would just highlight what they’re doing.

No. Center the agency. Mention the victims. Stop pretending this shit “just sort of happens”.

“British paratroopers opened fire on protesters in Northern Ireland 50 years ago.”

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