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The Truth and Nothing But the Truth. What About the Whole Truth?
We will read lots of coverage about the horrific shooting last night in California. But let me call your attention to another shooting last night and the news coverage surrounding it. This one took place a few blocks from where I work in bustling downtown Brooklyn NYC. At a Target store in a downtown shopping center. One dead. The coverage is almost uniform…
This from the NYPost, not known for pulling their punches…
A man was shot and killed inside a Target store at a shopping mall in downtown Brooklyn late Wednesday night, police said.
The 25-year-old, who was not immediately identified, was blasted at least once in the chest inside the Target on the second floor of City Point Mall at about 11:35 p.m., cops said.
He was rushed to Brooklyn Hospital Center and pronounced dead, authorities said.
Police arrested a 27-year-old man at the scene, but it’s unclear if he was the shooter, cops said. Charges against him were pending early Thursday morning.
Story after story all the same. Man shot dead. Target store Brooklyn. One arrested.
But one outlet has a richer, more detailed version of what actually happened …
This from the local NBC affiliate …
A man being chased by a group of men armed with a machete shot and killed another man inside a Brooklyn target minutes before the store was set to close, police say.
The fury unfolded at the store’s location at City Point, a multi-use shopping center on Albee Square in Downtown Brooklyn, around 11:30 p.m., when the alleged gunman stormed inside as he was being chased by at least four men he had just gotten into a dispute with, according to the NYPD.
The victim, 25-year-old-year-old Carlton Spencer, tried to approach the shooter from the side when the gunman turned to the would-be attacker and shot him once in the chest, said police, who added the victim was unarmed
The other three men in the group fled the area, but were quickly taken into custody, police said. The shooter was also taken into custody; their names have not yet been released.
Spencer was rushed to an area hospital, but was unable to be saved. Police said he had a criminal history, with his most recent arrest happening just days ago.
Somehow, the shooter being chased off the street and into the store by a group of machete-wielding men failed to make it into the other versions of the story? Nobody, on the cusp of the busy holiday shopping season, wanted to put that detail into the story; I guess. Bad enough it took place four or five blocks from the Barclays Center and the new multi-bazillion dollar Apple Store and luxury apartment development. No need to scare the shoppers with images of machete-armed groups on the street.
Or maybe it’s because Mayor DiBlasio and Governor Cuomo just got done telling us in innumerable ads that this week was about who we are as NYers … our soul and character. And the juxtaposition of armed gangs in the street with the “soul and character of NYers” is uncomfortable. Whatever the reason, important facts were scrubbed from the most versions of the news.
Keep this in mind as you read coverage of other events. They try not to lie outright. They’ll usually tell you things that are true … just not the whole truth.
Published in General
I agree. I’m still looking for a story with as much detail covering the CA shooting: what’s out is “man wearing a trench coat, dark glasses and a hood.” Details everyone saw but nothing more. I expect this story to drift silently into the trash bin.
Do we have an unarmed man with a machete?
Nah. I think group of 4 pursuers, at least one of them armed with a machete. That leaves room for 3 unarmed members.
Lies of omission by the press are very common. They may be the worst kind of lie.
Wow – that is unbelievable! How do you get into a Target or any shopping center at 11:30 PM at night? Isn’t everything locked up? Any surveillance cameras? Has crime picked up in the area you are in? On a side note, I cannot stand Cuomo and and I can’t believe he was re-elected – was the opponent worse? Maybe that’s the problem.
Isn’t it awful that the truth has become the exception and lies have become the norm.
The store is open late … the city that never sleeps, right. I’m sure there is surveillance footage, but we’ll probably never see it now that everyone involved is in custody. They usually only show the surveillance footage after a few days if they can’t identify the people in it … soliciting help from the public.
So, for example, the picture of the mid thirties guy who punched an 82 year old man in the face for blocking a subway turnstile just got released. Anyone with information please contact NYPD.
Ah yes. The soul and character of who we are …
Pre-Giuliani, that area of Brooklyn was on the borderline, between the ‘safe’ enclave of Brooklyn Heights and the troubled Fort Greene area to the east. Got a lot better between 1993 and 2013, and things don’t simply slip back to the way they were overnight. But after almost five full years of Bill de Blaiso as mayor, the signs are increasingly there (and not simply with this incident) that the problems that made large parts of NYC ‘no-go ‘ zones for three decades are on the way back, due in large part to who’s running City Hall.
There is no objective way to tell the news. There are just different subjective ways.
The sooner the Right realizes this, the better we will be at promoting the way we see the world.
Will the shooter, acting in self-defense, now be charged with a felony if he had that possession of that firearm without a license? Probably. MS-13 likes to chop people up with machetes so they can do their thing without violating the firearm possession restrictions. So we will likely make every effort to allow more members of MS-13 into the country while doing all we can to make sure Americans here cannot carry a firearm.
They did say he was 29 years old and driving his mother’s car.
I’ve worked in the neighbourhood for 15 years. I walk at lunch most every day. And the only place I have ever felt uncomfortable is in and around that mall area. It goes from hipster heaven to something else entirely in the twinkling of an eye. This makes three shootings near that same spot in the past coupl’a months. The other two were during the day. The soul and character of who we are …
This was the Thousand Oaks murderer.
As far as the Whole Truth goes, most of the deceptive reporting I see falls into the category of the old Soviet Union’s reporting on a (perhaps apocryphal) auto race. The headline was: Russian car comes in second, but the American car finishes next to last. The Whole Truth was that there were only two cars in the race. You can make anything look like anything else if you spin it right.
Historically accurate, but uncomfortable still.
Great. I just stopped my Patreon donations to Iowahawk yesterday.
Now I feel shame.
You are right up of course, but there are ways to be less subjective – and editors used to enforce these as journalistic standards.