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Reckless media coverage of the UnitedHealthcare murder
The press coverage of social media posts that glamorize Brian Thompson's murder is dangerous and out of touch with what nearly everyone actually believes.
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Even with everything going on in the world—the collapse of Assad’s regime in Syria and Trump’s appointments to his cabinet—this past week’s top story has been, unquestionably, the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
I don’t need to rehash the details of the assassination, the manhunt, or the coverage since.
But there is one part of this that’s worth calling out: the press has been reckless in its coverage of social media and how people are responding to Thompson’s murder. What they’re doing risks making things worse.
“Folk hero” is an asinine headline
From The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal to The Washington Post to USA Today, from Daily Kos to CNN to Fox News to Breitbart, a consistent narrative has emerged: there’s support for Thompson’s murderer on social media.¹ The NYT’s article was particularly flagrant.
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There’s an axiom in politics that “Twitter isn’t real life.”² That’s true not only of Twitter, whose users and posters aren’t at all representative of the general public,³ but also of social media more generally, where a vast majority of the posts come from a tiny percentage of the users.
I’m absent from social media entirely, but I’ve had enough friends send me screenshots to know that there are people out there celebrating Thompson’s murder. I’m not denying that. But by drawing so much attention to it, not only does it misstate the views of the average American, it actually risks making things much worse.
Reporters are not properly contextualizing what these posts mean, and the picture they’re painting of an angry, violent public is fundamentally disconnected from reality.
The vast majority of Americans do not support political violence
Political violence is a very real problem. There’s a reason that when we say “January 6,” people know what you’re referring to. I’ve written about political violence—it’s alarming and worth addressing head-on.
But the overwhelming majority of Americans agree that political violence is bad. There are polls that say 21% of Americans believe political violence is acceptable, but those polls meaningfully overstate how likely Americans are to actually believe in political violence. Here’s why:
From FiveThirtyEight: “Some of these responses [to political violence in polls] can be chalked up to respondents not paying close enough attention, vaguely worded questions or both… [When] presented with specific examples of political violence, between 89 and 100 percent of respondents wanted a suspect in a politically motivated violent crime charged.”⁴
From Pew Research Center: “Online opt-in polls can produce misleading results, especially for young people and Hispanic adults.”⁵ There are a few reasons why,⁶ but in short, people don’t have a strong incentive to answer questions honestly—and in many cases, aren’t.
The murder of Brian Thompson is political violence. We know that now, and it’s important and fair to call it out as such.
But saying that “some people” view him as a “folk hero” as front-page news with no context? That’s sensationalist and misleading. Even in the era of incendiary politics we live in, Americans do not support political violence like Thompson’s assassination.
This media coverage is more than misleading. It’s dangerous.
In journalism, it’s well understood that covering suicide has to be done delicately. Why? Because if it’s done without sensitivity, it leads to an increase in the suicide rate. Suicide contagion, as it’s known, is tragically a real phenomenon.
Consequently, there are guides for how the press should report on suicide. Here are two examples. The conclusion from the studies on this—and there are literally more than 100 that reach similar conclusions—is that glamorizing suicides makes other suicides more likely.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to suicide, by the way. It’s true of eating disorders.
It’s also true of school shootings and other violence: even if it’s not intentionally so, coverage that glamorizes people who commit high-profile acts of violence increases the odds of others doing the same.
The NYT and other media outlets should know better. The press cannot control what goes viral online, but I genuinely fear that their coverage could lead to more violence.
One final thought
One thing that should be alarming, coming out of all of this, and something I’d like to see covered more: the breadth of surveillance in New York City (and potentially elsewhere).
Obviously, I’m glad that police tracked down a murderer. But I’m also unsettled by just how many cameras had eyes on someone’s every move for the better part of a week.
In places like Hong Kong, we’ve already seen the consequences of this much surveillance. And in a world where Trump is threatening to somewhat indiscriminately deport migrants and use the Department of Justice as a tool for personal vengeance, it’s worth thinking hard about whether we’re comfortable with this tradeoff of privacy vs. security.
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As a general rule: if you’re writing an article that’s just a recap of things you read on social media, you’re producing shitty journalism.
Also as a general rule, on social media and in real life: don’t applaud death. Exceptions: really none.
Any of us who have been thoroughly dragged online for criticizing “Defund the Police,” a movement that was never popular and always a terrible idea, can speak to that.
Candidly, I think the media really missed the mark on this one too, probably for the same set of reasons—loud voices on social media do not represent the views of the public, but they do a good job inundating our feeds.
In a post-Elon world, that’s probably even truer now than it was in 2022, when that research was published.
Obviously, that last part—the percentage of people who want perpetrators of political violence charged—is particularly salient here, and a good reflection of the fact that support for this murder is not the norm, despite what some of the press coverage has looked like.
The data on this are robust to a degree that The Economist had to walk back an article that claimed one-in-five young Americans believe that the Holocaust was a myth. This is the topic of a much longer conversation—Holocaust denial is a very real problem, and education levels related to the Holocaust and WWII are waning. I wrote about this literally last week. But it’s also important to recognize that these surveys, sometimes, can overstate the scale of these problems.
From Pew: “In particular, several recent studies have documented large errors in online opt-in surveys due to the presence of so-called ‘bogus respondents.’ These respondents do not answer questions sincerely; instead, they attempt to complete surveys with as little effort as possible to earn money or other rewards.”
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