NYT odd take on Navy Yard shooter

[thesquanderer]

As expected, the current "front page" at nytimes.com focuses on the navy yard shooter.

The top headline is "Focus Shifts to Motive in Navy Yard Deaths"

The secondary headline under that is "Suspect Had Been Arrested Twice on Gun Offenses" followed by this brief summary of the linked article:

Aaron Alexis served as a Navy reservist, had an interest in Thailand and Buddhism and had run-ins with the law.


Interesting to see what the NYT thinks is the most important bit of a story to put on its front page. Apparently, one of the most important things to know about him, is that he had an interest in Buddhism. That plays right into people's fear and prejudices that people from "exotic" non-western religions are weird or dangerous. At a minimum, he's "not one of us."

If you read the article, you'll see that the shooter may have suffered PTSD from being part of rescue efforts at 9/11. Whole different spin, if they had picked that instead to be the front page takeaway.

[Yo_Mama]

1. I think it's a way of saying "not a Muslim terrorist"

Because a lot of people would presume that.

[Scuba]

2. America's conservatives are pretty sure that Buddhism and Islam are the same.

That is to say "not like us".

[11 Bravo]

3. And practiced predominantly by a lot of brown people.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

4. uh-huh!! Faux News and CNN couldn't wait to put his black face on the screen...

...and keep it there all night long! They just couldn't wait!!

[pintobean]

9. Don't they do that with every shooter

when there's a mass shooting? They all do.

[Supersedeas]

10. Bingo

[Crepuscular]

5. or maybe

it's just commentary on a somewhat interesting apparent contradiction, since Buddhism is such a gentle, peaceful philosophy. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, despite the desire of some to turn it into something completely different.

[thesquanderer]

7. You could be right.

I guess it depends on what level of sophistication you assign to the typical visitor to nytimes.com. And I'd certainly be more concerned about seeing it as a crawl on fox news, where I think it might be more intentionally incendiary. But I would hope the Times would be cognizant of the entire range of attitudes and backgrounds of their potential web visitors. Assuming your interpretation is correct and that that was the idea they were specifically going after, if that paragraph had made some reference to the ironic or paradoxical nature of his connection to Buddhism, I think it could have been clear and the odds of misinterpretation would have gone down dramatically. (Though I'm sure those with the most bias-againt-other would remain unmoved in their opinions.)

[frazzled]

6. I think you're overthinking that

The description is just a way of painting a full portrait of the guy. It might have said "served as a Navy reservist, had an interest in race cars and modern art, and had run-ins with the law."

[thesquanderer]

8. Yes, they could have picked anything, but...

...religion is such a hot button at the moment, especially when linked to violence, that I think it dealing with it deserves some extra care. And after all, someone did have to choose which of the many details to highlight. The attributes to include in the front page summary were presumably not picked at random with a dart board, so someone thought that his connection to Buddhism was one of the more interesting or significant ones.... and as the earlier poster said, maybe because of the inherent contradiction. But that does presume a decent level of sophistication in the readership, for that contradiction to be entirely and immediately self-evident.