In the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attack, the New York Daily News has led the charge in the Gawkerization of media, by, most egregiously, mocking condolences and prayers sent to victims’ families by GOP candidates and labeling NRA head Wayne LaPierre a terrorist.
The Daily News is desperately attempting to generate page clicks, ad buys, and gasps of outrage on social media by going after any cause and every usual suspect not actually associated with the attack in any way, namely a lack of so-called gun control (and an abundance of God apparently), which they indiscriminately used to link the San Bernardino shootings to recent shootings in Colorado and Charleston. They certainly weren’t alone, but they have been by far the most incendiary.
“God Isn’t Fixing This,” they declared on their front page the morning after the attack. When the identity of the Muslim shooter was revealed, they placed Wayne LaPierre’s photo alongside his and opined that LaPierre was a terrorist too. Daily News columnist Linda Stasi, in a head-scratching and hateful piece, argued that one of the victims, Nicholas Thalasinos, a worker at the targeted center and a Messianic Jew, brought the attack on his own “bigoted” self, going as far as to not count him among the innocent killed. This bold new turn of the Daily News’s seemed to pay off the way they had hoped — it generated widespread denunciation — and the editors resorted to offering up a bizarre cover featuring puppies and animals as a response to outrage and mockery on social media.
Today is the 74th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. As we take a moment to remember the heroes who fought and died that day, let us take a look back through time at how the Daily News itself might have covered this attack had it occurred in today’s political and publishing climate.
— Stephen L. Miller is a writer living in Brooklyn, N.Y. He publishes The Wilderness, which focuses on viral politics and social media.
#share#