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Another day, another mass shooting. Yesterday, a gunman killed ten people at a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado. Only one of the victims, a police officer named Eric Talley, has been identified. The shooting came less than a week after a white gunman killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women, at three spas in the Atlanta area. By the time of the Boulder attack, the news cycle that followed Atlantaâitself an inadequate marker of human worthâhad yet to conclude; there remains much that we donât know about the victims. The work of telling their life stories must now proceed alongside similar work elsewhere. âToday, I worked on a segment about one mass shooting that had to be postponed due to breaking news on another mass shooting,â CNNâs Kim Berryman tweeted yesterday. âAt one point, I said to a friend, âI’m not sure if this will air since we are in a different shooting nowâŠâ This is not okay.â
In the hours after the Boulder shooting, confirmed details were scarce; a first police press conference was delayed, and when it came, officers did not offer a death count, only confirming the toll at a later, second briefing. âItâs an unusually long period of time for us to have gone after what appears to have been a mass shooting where we had no official information from authorities,â Rachel Maddow noted on MSNBC. âIâll be brutally honest,â the national-security analyst Juliette Kayyem said on CNN, âI donât like delayed press conferences⊠It means that the story is not simple, unfortunately.â (Fox didnât air either briefing live.) In the meantime, hosts on CNN and MSNBC patched in their legal pundits, reporters, and, from time to time, witnesses; networks also excerpted from a video of part of the incident that Dean Schillerâa self-identified âindependent journalistâ who also appeared on TV as a witnessâstreamed live and uploaded to ZFG Videography, his YouTube channel. (As of this morning, YouTube had appended a warning label and an age restriction to the video, but not taken it down.) Schiller regularly films law enforcement activity in Boulder, and has styled himself, in the past, as a sort of police watchdog; according to Westword, he was once arrested, along with another videographer, while filming at the county jail, and later sued the city. Yesterday, the Gazette noted, âsocial media lit up with criticismâ of Schiller because âhe appeared to walk by victims without rendering aid. He was also criticized for revealing tactical police information.â
Related: Where is the gun reform debate after Atlanta?
As the situation developed, local print and TV reporters turned up at the scene. Some of them also appeared on national cable news as the night went on; Anna Haynes, the editor of a student news site at the University of Colorado Boulder, lives across the street from the King Soopers, and told Maddow that she saw the gunman shooting at someone in the parking lot. Haynesâs paper, the CU Independent, produced several breaking-news stories on the shooting. The Boulder Daily Camera covered the scene, too; other Colorado papers reflected on why the state has seen so many mass shootings over the years, including the Columbine High School shooting, in 1999, and the Aurora movie-theater shooting, in 2012. The Denver Post re-upped its 2019 finding that Colorado has had more such incidents per capita than all but four other states; the Colorado Sun noted that these have often been âamong the most notorious and deadly in American history.â Marc Sallinger, a twenty-five-year-old reporter with 9 News, told the BBC that heâs already covered âat least fourâ mass shootings in his short career. âThis one felt different in that it was closer to home,â he said. âIt was a location that Iâd driven by dozens of times over the years growing up.â Jesse Paul, of the Sun, said this wasnât even the first shooting heâs covered that involved a King Soopers: âWhen a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood was attacked in 2015, victims went into the nearby King Soopers seeking aid and shelter.â
The trauma of mass shootings, of course, is not limited to the places where they happen. As the Boulder story unfolded, MSNBCâs Chris Hayes spoke with Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who said he was thinking about the families who lost children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in his state. âEvery single time thereâs another mass shooting,â Murphy said, âthey relive the experiences of 2012.â The same will be true, and much more immediate, for survivors and victimsâ loved ones in Atlanta. Murphy told Hayes that the close proximity of the Atlanta and Boulder shootings may not be a coincidence, since âmass shooters tend to study other mass shootersâ; Hayes suggested that the media should be careful not to help inspire copycats. Murphy said that he hopes âthis is not the second in a string of shootings that weâre gonna see.â According to a database maintained by the Associated Press, USA Today, and Northeastern University, the Boulder shooting was already the seventh mass killing of 2021.
Already, the mass shooting story is repetitive. Sometimes, such close repetition can galvanize national attention and grief; as I noted yesterday, the near simultaneity of shootings in El Paso and Dayton, in 2019, drove a sharp, albeit sadly short-lived, focus on gun reform that has, thus far, been almost completely lacking in the wake of Atlanta. Weâll have to wait and see if the pluralization of recent tragedies has the same effect this time; weâll also wait to learn more about the gunmanâs motive, his weapon and how he obtained it, and, most importantly, the victims. We already know that there is recent context around guns in Boulderâjust last week, a judge blocked the city from enforcing a ban on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, in a case that was supported by the NRA. As we learn more and the news cycle moves on, it must address both local particulars and the universal context, while not forgetting what happened in Atlanta, and its own particularsânot least the conversation that has since crystallized around surging anti-Asian hate.
Before I finished writing today, I checked, as I sometimes do, to see that the headline Iâd written hadnât been duplicated elsewhere; I found my wording, âAnother day, another mass shooting,â atop a slew of articlesâabout past shootings in Oregon, Las Vegas, Tallahassee, Gilroy, El Paso, Daytonâbut decided not to change it. The repetition of these horrors is, in a sense, just as much the point as their individuality. This is a point Iâve made, well, repeatedly: in the wake of the 2019 shooting in Virginia Beach, I wrote that âsometimes, repetition in coverage is simply unavoidable,â and that âwhere it is necessary, we should make it a virtue,â including by stressing that lawmakers âcan take steps to stop atrocities like this one.â They still can; they still havenât. We didnât say it enough post-Atlanta. Itâs still post-Atlanta. We already have another chance.
Below, more on Colorado and shootings:
- Columbine: In the wake of the El Paso and Dayton shootings, in 2019, John Temple, who had been the editor of Denverâs Rocky Mountain News at the time of the Columbine shooting, wrote for The Atlantic that heâd been convinced, at the time, that Columbine would âchange everythingââand yet it did not. âThe Columbine attack was covered live on cable and broadcast television,â he wrote. âHow could we let anything so horrible happen again?â After Templeâs article came out, he discussed it with Kyle Pope, CJRâs editor and publisher, on our podcast, The Kicker; you can listen here.
- The victims: As of this morning, the second most popular article on the website of the Daily Camera, behind its coverage of the shooting, was a piece from 2013 headlined, âDoused duckling rescue: Boulder police retrieve family of ducks from drainage ditch.â Mitchell Byars, who wrote both articles, was wondering why the 2013 piece was being read now. He then realized that Talley, the officer killed at King Soopers, featured in it.
- The local-news landscape: The Mountain News, where Temple served as editor, shut down in 2009; the Denver Post and the Daily Camera, meanwhile, are both owned by Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund notorious for sharp cuts at its media properties. In 2018, the Post published a scathing editorial about Alden following a round of newsroom layoffs; around the same time, Dave Krieger, the Daily Cameraâs editorial page editor, self-published another anti-Alden editorial that he said had been spiked by the paperâs publisher, and was subsequently fired. Corey Hutchins reported on the episode for CJR.
Other notable stories:
- The Postâs Paul Farhi reports that âjournalismâs Trump bump may be giving way to a slumpââsince Trump left office, traffic to news sites is down, as is cable viewership. After surpassing Fox News and MSNBC in January, CNN has since lost forty-five percent of its prime-time audience, Farhi writes. MSNBCâs audience fell twenty-six percent in the same period, while Fox âhas essentially regained its leading position by standing still; its ratings have fallen just six percent since the first weeks of the year.â
- For her first cover as editor of The Cut, Lindsay Peoples Wagner decided to feature CNNâs rising star Abby Phillip, who, she writes, âhas given countless women of color someone to look up to, someone who would speak the truth we were all thinking at home, and someone who wouldnât be afraid to call out white supremacy on national television.â The Cut also convened a conversation between Phillip and Gayle King.
- CJRâs Feven Merid profiles Prism, a newsroom staffed by women of color that was founded, in 2019, to cover perspectives that are âcurrently underreported by national media.â Prismâs âsensibility is most evident in the way it organizes beats,â Merid writes. âVisitors to the site wonât find coverage filed under âpolitics,â âbusiness, or âhealthâ; instead theyâll see âelectoral justice,â âworkersâ rights,â âgender justice,â and âracial justice.ââ
- Steven Perlberg, of Insider, reports that Fortune magazine lost ten-million dollars in 2020 as the pandemic hammered its live-events business; Chatchaval Jiaravanon, Fortuneâs billionaire owner, has pumped money into the magazine, on the condition that it become profitable by the end of this year. The financial turbulence forms the backdrop to a union drive at Fortuneâlast week, staffers walked off the job in protest of bossesâ conduct.
- Prosecutors in Worcester, Massachusetts, dropped their case against Richard Cummings, a freelance photojournalist who was arrested on the margins of a protest in the city last summer. Prior to the decision, Cummings was one of at least twelve journalists still facing charges related to their coverage of protests last year. He told me recently that he felt as if an âuncertain dark cloudâ had been following him around.
- On Sunday night, KGET-17, a TV station in Bakersfield, California, was forced to interrupt its 11pm newscast and evacuate its offices after a vehicle was set on fire outside. Police believe that the fire was intentional and have since arrested a suspect on the grounds of âattempted arson of an inhabited building.â The suspectâs motives are still under investigation. The Bakersfield Californian has more details.
- Last year, Tribune Publishing permanently shuttered the physical newsrooms of papers including the New York Daily News. Now a similar trend is occurring overseas: Reach, which publishes tabloids and local papers in the UK, said last week that it would close its offices in âmid-sized towns,â and Torstar, which owns papers in Canada, now plans to shutter two offices. (For more on the future of the newsroom, read Ruth Margalit in CJR.)
- Earlier today, Reporters Without Borders sued Facebook in France; the lawsuit, RSF says, accuses Facebook of ââdeceptive commercial practicesâ on the grounds that the social media companyâs promises to provide a âsafeâ and âerror-freeâ online environment are contradicted by the large-scale proliferation of hate speech and false information.â RSF noted Franceâs strong consumer laws, but said it may yet sue Facebook elsewhere.
- And attorneys for Sidney Powell, the Kraken-releasing Trump election lawyer, asked a court to dismiss the defamation suit filed against her by Dominion Voting Systems, a company that Powell baselessly accused of fraudâon the grounds that âno reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.â (Her lawyers said that she nevertheless âbelieved the allegations then and she believes them now.â)
ICYMI: Seeing through a new Prism
Correction:Â This article has been updated to clarify that YouTube appended warnings to the livestream of the Boulder shooting.
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJRâs newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.