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In June 1984, Alan Berg, a talk radio host, was gunned down while getting out of his car outside the building where he lived in Denver. He was fifty. The next day, a report in the New York Times described Berg as “outspoken” and as a practitioner of what “some have called ‘insult radio,’” which “appears to be a growing phenomenon”—though “unlike some of the insult entertainers,” Berg’s “attacks were usually on the intelligence of his callers and guests or their ideas on serious issues rather than on their sex, race or nationality.” (In an interview prior to his death, Berg himself said “I stick it to the audience and they love it.”) In the immediate aftermath of his murder, the police said they had “zero” idea who had killed Berg, or why. Richard Lamm—the governor of Colorado, who regularly appeared on Berg’s show—said it was a “societal tragedy” that people too often respond to views they dislike with violence. Others in Berg’s line of work suggested that living with this reality was par for the course. “I think if there’s nuts out there, it doesn’t matter what kind of format you have,” Wally George, a conservative talk show host in California, said. “Everyone in this line gets threats.”

Last Wednesday, Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist and media personality, was gunned down while debating with students at Utah Valley University. He was thirty-one. A report in the Times described Kirk as “outspoken” on “a variety of hotly contested topics—race, gun control, abortion—in ways that often stoked controversy,” and also as a “critic of gay and transgender rights.” (Kirk frequently invited his critics to, in the name of a recurring feature of his events, “Prove Me Wrong.”) In the immediate aftermath of his murder, the police didn’t seem to have any idea who had killed Kirk, or why. Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, decried a “tragic day for our nation,” and said that he was praying that “all of us will try to find a way to stop hating our fellow Americans.” Other content creators expressed fears for their own safety. The socialist streamer Hasan Piker described the attack as a “wake-up call.” As Yona TR Golding noted in CJR, the right-wing streamer Adin Ross said, of the political left, “I’m not going to bait these motherfuckers anymore. I don’t want smoke.”

After sickening attacks like the assassination of Kirk, it can be tempting for media observers to declare, as the Times editorial board promptly did, that “such violence is antithetical to America,” or that this is not who we are. As a philosophical aspiration, this is noble, but as a matter of fact, it is patently incorrect—America has a long history of violent attacks on politicians, commentators, and journalists, some of which jump immediately to mind at times like this, others of which have been lost to the mists of history. (Writing three years ago this week, after a Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter was murdered by a subject of his reporting, I was surprised to learn that at least thirty-nine members of the press had lost their lives in relation to their work in the US since 1837, some of whom—including five Vietnamese American journalists killed in the 1980s—I had never heard of.) Kirk was not a journalist; indeed, he explicitly acknowledged as much to Brigham Tomco, a reporter at Utah’s Deseret News who profiled Kirk right before his death (and spoke to CJR’s Josh Hersh right after it). But he dwelled in the pleural space between politics and media in a way that was both thoroughly modern and had antecedents—for example, in the heyday of political talk radio. As The Bulwark’s Will Sommer noted, Kirk studied Rush Limbaugh as a teenager, and “thought about how to adapt Limbaugh’s mix of bombast, politics, and entertainment to his own generation.” He clearly succeeded.

Of course, while history often rhymes, it does not exactly repeat. Much about this, the moment of Kirk’s killing, is distinctive, and distinctively vile. We live in a world in which people can not only choose to see the stomach-churningly graphic footage of a bullet tearing into Kirk, but are often forced to by algorithmic chance, not that “chance” is really the right word for platforms that, by design, amplify the reach of the inflammatory and degraded. (I certainly count myself fortunate that I’ve managed to avoid coming across the video, at least in a format that I couldn’t quickly scroll past.) We live in a world, too, in which otherwise obscure figures’ responses to Kirk’s death can rocket across the internet, with consequences that tumble offline. (Already, people are reportedly losing their jobs for being deemed to have celebrated it.) Of course, this is also the world in which Kirk was able to build an extraordinary level of fame and influence, not least thanks to inflammatory remarks and conduct of his own. (As the Times’ Jamelle Bouie notes, Kirk’s “first act on the national stage” was to create an online database of academics with supposedly leftist ideas, the purpose of which was to encourage contributors to report them to their superiors.)

If Kirk was a creature of new media, he was also clearly savvy about using old media to disseminate his message: he was a regular on cable news, for instance, and personally charmed even critical journalists. I’ve written repeatedly in this newsletter about how the lines separating old and new media are blurrier than they might seem at a glance, and how the former still has an influence in an age when the latter appears increasingly to set the agenda. Still, if one were searching for a case study in old media looking upon a modern moment and failing to communicate its rhythms and stakes, you could do much worse. There has been some astute coverage in traditional mainstream precincts, of course; as ever, “old media” is a big place, and Kirk’s death has rightly been a huge story across it. But much of it has taken the form of fingers-in-ears civility wish-fulfillment. TV journalists and their politician guests have taken to the airwaves to somberly opine about how the internet is driving us apart—a true statement (see above), but one so tritely oversimplified as to be utterly useless. Ditto the predictable hand-wringing about how both sides really need to be nicer to each other, a sentiment that has been expressed not only explicitly but implicitly, not least via a raft of fawning coverage elevating Cox, the Utah governor, into the unifying leader we need right now. It’s true that Cox has long urged Americans to “disagree better” and to lower the temperature of political discourse. It’s also true that this did not stop him from endorsing Donald Trump last year or from failing to condemn Trump’s response to the Kirk shooting, in which he—well, more on that in a bit. Cox has also said that he prayed that Kirk’s killer would turn out not to come from Utah, but from another state—or country. Suspending basic human empathy toward political figures can be a dangerous game, but when you’re the media, so can suspending basic scrutiny of their words.

As I noted above, this sort of thinking is also ahistorical—a vice that one would hope might not afflict “old” media, but reliably does; in this institutional case, age brings wisdom only if it comes with memory. (Curiously little Kirk coverage, for example, brought up the story of Alan Berg, though The Forward’s Rob Eshman dug into it and the historian John Ganz mentioned it in an essay that, pound for pound, was the most thoughtful reflection I’ve yet read on Kirk’s killing—and was published not by a legacy outlet, but on Ganz’s Substack.) In a more recent sense, no little mainstream coverage exhibited some amnesia as to who Kirk was and what his views were. I think that he was a complex human being who did not entirely fit the stereotypes that have depicted him, variously, as an inflammatory preacher of division or a “happy warrior” who “was practicing politics the right way”; I think he was capable of being both of these things. That he was capable of the latter is not merely a posthumous judgment: I wrote earlier this year that his appearance on a podcast hosted by California governor Gavin Newsom—while undeniably weird—was at times very substantive; Tomco suggested to Hersh that he grappled with Kirk’s rhetorical contradictions while profiling him. But some coverage has pretended that Kirk wasn’t often the former. This might be for fear of being accused of politicizing his killing in this particularly febrile climate. (A Republican lawmaker accused a reporter at a Florida news site of doing precisely this after the reporter texted to ask whether Kirk’s shooting had changed the lawmaker’s thinking about gun rules on college campuses; the reporter was suspended.) It might be rooted in a deeper–seated mainstream-media instinct not to speak ill of the recently dead—or to point to facts about them that may look like speaking ill. I’ve always found this strange. In Kirk’s case, it not only has warped the accuracy of a complex story, but, as Bouie’s piece noted, appears at odds with Kirk’s own unabashed advocacy for his views (not to mention his very recent stance that it is not inherently inappropriate to talk politically about death).

If many old-media figures steered away from anything remotely smelling of politicization, many new-media dwellers showed no such hesitation. This, yes, did involve random people of the left and right trading insensitive posts on social media. Some leading old–media voices have suggested that such discourse was not representative of the reaction of the online majority—one of shared grief. Numerically, maybe so. But all commentators are not created equal, and when social media trolls and cable news hosts—who not only have huge followings but direct lines to the White House—are preaching messages of retaliatory war, that’s hard to ignore. Not that the occupant of the White House needed an assist: on Wednesday night, even before a suspect in Kirk’s assassination had been identified, Trump posted a video in which he pinned the blame on the “radical left” for inciting violence and—vaguely, yet unmistakably broadly—threatened reprisals. His remarks would have been grotesquely irresponsible even if they weren’t also risibly hypocritical, and didn’t also come in the context of a chilling, preexisting clampdown on dissent. They were, and they did. And yet news organizations have not consistently been able to frame the pretext that Trump is claiming from Kirk’s killing with due urgency, or even clarity. (“In an Era of Deep Polarization, Unity Is Not Trump’s Mission,” one headline read; “Charlie Kirk’s assassination tests Trump’s ability to help a nation heal,” read another.) Maybe, again, we are dealing here with a fear of what Trump might do with this pretext. (It’s clear that he sees the media as a vector for the radical left, and some of his allies have explicitly said as much in the wake of Kirk’s killing.) Perhaps, still, old-media types just really want to believe that Trump is capable of unifying moral leadership. At this point, I’m not sure which option reflects most poorly.

Perhaps perversely in light of the above—but actually, in some ways, because of it—I’m also not convinced that the ample coverage predicting the all-but-inevitable intensification of political violence has been all that helpful. This is not to say that platitudinous hand-wringing of the we must turn the temperature down variety is helpful, either. But speaking with certainty—and without humility—about where this story will go next risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, or at least being wrong. Kirk’s killing was, for sure, the latest in a recent string of heinous acts. But that string is a long one, if you follow it back far enough. This, of course, is not a hopeful realization. But it is one that can cool the flaming sense of exceptionalism of this moment—a sense that is already being used to justify exceptional, deeply troubling responses. The story of political violence is, ultimately, a complex one. It was feared, after a gunman tried to assassinate Trump on the campaign trail last year, that the situation might degenerate into an out-of-control tit for tat—but the worst-case scenario didn’t come to pass, or at least, if you believe it still might, is revealing itself slowly. For Kirk and his young family, the worst-case scenario did hit. That shouldn’t be diminished. But it can be contextualized.

It eventually emerged that Berg, who was Jewish, was murdered by members of The Order, a neo-Nazi group. Before that was known, the Times spoke with other outspoken radio personalities—including Larry King and Don Imus—about the impact of his killing on them and their work. (Per the Times, Howard Stern’s network considered him such “a talking tinder box, so ready to cause social combustion,” that bosses asked him not to speak to the press about Berg.) George, the conservative host from California, said that those in his position “are taking your life in your hands when you are a controversial personality. You can anger people. I feel that what I’m doing is a necessary thing, and the danger involved is just part of the game. You either accept it, or you do something else.” That should not have been the price of speech then, and it should not be now. Sometimes, it is. And it was. It’s a societal tragedy.

Other Notable Stories… 
By Jem Bartholomew

• On Thursday, fifty-two people, including nine journalists, were freed from arbitrary detention by Belarus ​​after a US delegation visited Minsk. Alexander Lukashenko, the country’s authoritarian leader since 1994 and a close ally of Vladimir Putin, is casting himself as a mediator between Donald Trump and the Russian president. The US will relax sanctions on Belarus’s national airline in return. But the fifty-two figure was far below US demands. There are more than a thousand people who remain “unjustly criminalized” in prison, according to Amnesty International. The nine freed journalists had been locked up by the repressive regime for supposed crimes including “extremism,” “incitement of hatred,” and “discrediting Belarus.” (Jon Allsop wrote for CJR about Belarus’s war on the press in January—read it here). Reacting to the releases, Karol Łuczka, advocacy lead in Eastern Europe for the International Press Institute, said: “While we welcome the release of nine courageous journalists in Belarus, who were jailed for nothing more than doing their jobs, we also demand the release of their [twenty-seven] colleagues who remain behind bars” and who are “facing ill treatment and in many cases torture.”

• Nine Israeli soldiers stormed the home of Oscar-winning Palestinian director Basel Adra on Saturday, searching for him and going through his wife Suha’s phone while their nine-month-old daughter was home, he told the AP. Adra codirected No Other Land, which won this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film, and explored the reality of life under Israel’s illegal occupation for Palestinians in the Masafer Yatta region. Amid Saturday’s raid, settlers also attacked Adra’s village and injured two of his brothers and one cousin, leaving one man hospitalized with bruising to the hand, elbow, and chest, according to hospital records seen by the AP. The incident comes after one of Adra’s codirectors, Hamdan Ballal, was attacked by settlers and detained by the Israeli military in March. “The whole system is built to attack us, to terrify us, to make us very scared,” Adra said.

• Two men, aged fifty-eight and thirty-one, were arrested on suspicion of placing an incendiary device under a news vehicle in Salt Lake City on Friday, authorities said yesterday. The device “had been lit but failed to function as designed,” according to court records seen by KUTV. The incident comes after media arrived in Salt Lake City following the shooting of Charlie Kirk at the nearby Utah Valley University. The men could face terrorism and weapons charges after the discovery of the bomb. No information about a possible motive has yet been released by police.

• On May 14 last year, a subtle shift in the tectonic plates of the internet occurred. Google, the search engine that had dominated the Web for about two decades by providing an efficient list of relevant links in response to written prompts, introduced AI Overview in the US. Users would find answers summarized at the top of their search results; the company promised that “our custom Gemini model can take the legwork out of searching.” Just over a year on, however, media companies are facing a “devastating drop” in online traffic. (In case you missed it: Klaudia Jaźwińska wrote for CJR about the impact of the “traffic apocalypse.”) On Friday, Penske Media, owner of Rolling Stone and the Hollywood Reporter among other titles, became the first company to challenge Google in court. Penske has brought a lawsuit that alleges AI summaries are illegally using its original reporting and depressing online traffic, and seeks a permanent injunction against Google as well as monetary damages.

• And there was a flurry of news on newsletters last week. Mehdi Hasan is expanding his Substack publication Zeteo—which has almost half a million subscribers, he says—and has made multiple hires from Rolling Stone. Hasan wants to compete with agenda-setting morning newsletters like Politico’s Playbook but from a progressive perspective. Elsewhere, one newsletter startup looks set to acquire another, as Puck entered into an exclusive agreement to acquire Air Mail. Puck, formed in 2021 and covering a range of industries with scoop-driven newsletters, will reportedly make Air Mail, a weekly newsletter founded in 2019, its weekend offering. (The news was first published by another digital news startup, Breaker.) Sam Sifton, an assistant managing editor at the Times who also writes the Cooking newsletter, will be the next writer, host, and anchor of the publication’s flagship Morning newsletter, the company announced. And Ravi Somaiya, former CJR digital editor and Times media reporter, is launching Bungalow, a new home for long reads “outside of the daily (and sometimes hourly) news cycle,” Semafor reports.

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