By Becket Adams
Sunday, January 05, 2025
There’s a thin line between being helpful and being
unhelpful.
When it comes to reporting on terrorist attacks, the
press often chooses to be unhelpful, believing it is doing the exact opposite.
In the early hours of January 1, a driver sped his truck
down crowded Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 New Year’s revelers and
injuring nearly three times as many. The driver was later brought down by a
barrage of bullets after a brief gunfight with law enforcement officials.
As details of the attack emerged in dribs and drabs,
including the number of dead, the gunfight, and even the type of vehicle that
was used in the attack, major media fell back on that most unhelpful and
uninformative of habits: attributing an action to an inanimate object.
“Casualties feared after vehicle hits crowd in New
Orleans,” the BBC reported at around 6 a.m. on January 1.
Noted CBS News not long after, “Reported fatalities in
New Orleans as vehicle apparently slams into Bourbon Street crowd.”
Kneejerk contrarians argue that the press should be
praised for its caution, deeming it noble. Reporters shouldn’t say anything of
the person behind the wheel of the vehicle because doing so may imply intent.
What if the driver was merely drunk or disoriented? What then?
Sure, but why not just say “driver”? Are we supposed to
hold out for the possibility that a vehicle somehow found a hill in New Orleans
and rolled its way to Bourbon Street?
Furthermore, this weak defense of the press ignores the
facts as they unfolded in New Orleans on January 1. When CBS, the BBC, and
others published headlines suggesting a vehicle had attacked revelers, it had
already been confirmed that the driver engaged in a brief firefight with the
police. Are we also expected to consider the possibility that the gun somehow
discharged on its own?
More to the point: At the time of this reporting, even
with many details yet to be confirmed, it was known that a man had
driven the truck on a deadly rampage and had been killed in that gunfight with
police. Yet reports made it sound as if a vehicle had up and slammed into
pedestrians of its own accord.
Sure, there’s something to say of the fog in the first
couple of hours after a breaking event. But what are we to make of the
following New York Times headline published nearly five hours after the
attack: “At least 10 killed after vehicle drives into crowd in New
Orleans.” The subhead read, “At least 30 more people were injured after a
vehicle drove into a large crowd on Bourbon Street early Wednesday, the city
said.”
When the New York Times published this, New
Orleans mayor LaToya Cantrell had already characterized the deadly event
specifically as a “terrorist attack.” New Orleans police chief Anne
Kirkpatrick had also confirmed the attack was not a drunk-driving situation,
stressing the assault was intentional and that the motorist was trying to run
down pedestrians.
If we know the driver engaged in a firefight with the
police, and we know it’s not a drunk-driver situation, and police say the
attack is intentional, and the city’s highest-ranking official calls it a
“terrorist act,” there’s no reason to hedge our bets between “driver” and
“vehicle.” There’s no reason to be afraid of plain, clear language. Obscuring
the story with too-careful-by-half word choice is helpful to no one. It muddies
things, which is the opposite of being informative — the very purpose of a news
report.
(To be fair to the New York Times and others, they
are at least consistent with this awful shtick. In August 2017, for example,
after the deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Va., this was a real headline that
the New York Times published: “A violent protest in Charlottesville
turned tragic when a car hit pedestrians. Witnesses caught the moment on
video.” Though it was only later known that the motorist was James Alex Fields
Jr., an avowed neo-Nazi, who is currently serving a life sentence in federal
prison, at the time it was obvious that someone had been behind the
wheel.)
In the mid-1990s, the late Rush Limbaugh regularly hosted a segment on his radio show
wherein he parodied the press’s coverage of SUV-related accidents.
He’d highlight news segments and headlines such as “Out-of-control SUV kills 16-year-old St. Paul girl” and “St. Paul teen killed by SUV remembered at her funeral,”
arguing that the editorial choice to make it sound as if the vehicles had acted
independently was by design. The purpose of the wording, Limbaugh claimed, was
to further the narrative that SUVs, which were deemed environmentally
unfriendly by the Sierra Club in the ’90s, posed a serious, possibly bannable
health hazard. The point of the inanimate object as culprit, Limbaugh said, was
to shepherd audiences away from particular facts or toward press-approved
narratives — not the sharing of straightforward information.
On Thursday, the print edition of the Washington Post bore the following headline: “Truck
rams New Orleans crowd.”
My, how things haven’t changed.
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