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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 âEric Adams liesâ.
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:âOther elected officials and a lawyer for the teenage defendant disputed Mayor Eric Adamsâs characterization of the lawâs role in the caseâ
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Bloody Sunday?
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oh, right, the other thing.
Given that âunfoldingâ has been used to described everything from military battles, to war crimes, to mass murders why would it raise eyebrows? Itâs a clichĂ©.
Sure dude.
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Itâs a CLICHE that is regularly invoked to cover over crimes, dude. Why is that acceptable to you?
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TIL - words donât matter. 
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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, doesnât negate the societal harm of passive-voicing crimes against humanity.
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Especially not when Irish lives are on the line⊠
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rummaging through 20th century google books, I have seen âunfolding gunfireâ 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 âunfoldâ 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 didnât 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. Itâs 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. Thatâs 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)âŠ
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 itâs keeping the âgoodâ people safe from the âbadâ 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, itâs 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 âI hit himâ is put into the passive âHe is hitâ, and either the actor is dropped or has to be added back as âby meâ.
In âgunfire unfoldedâ, this is an active voice. The subject is âgunfireâ, the verb is âto unfoldâ. The passive voice would be "gunfire was unfolded*. Which makes it more clear what the point of it all is, and what weâre 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 theyâre doing.
No. Center the agency. Mention the victims. Stop pretending this shit âjust sort of happensâ.
âBritish paratroopers opened fire on protesters in Northern Ireland 50 years ago.â
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