Another day. Another mass shooting. This one at a private Christian grade school in Nashville.
A 28-year-old carrying two assault-style rifles and a pistol shot and killed three students and three adults on Monday before being killed by police. Law enforcement said all three children were 9 years old.
Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake told reporters, “I was literally moved to tears to see this and the kids as they were being ushered out of the building.”
President Joe Biden called it a “family’s worst nightmare.”
Hours earlier, The Washington Post’s Todd C. Frankel, Shawn Boburg, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker and Alex Horton published a story with the headline “The gun that divides a nation.” It was about the AR-15 — the best-selling rifle in America that the Post writes has “gained a polarizing hold on the American imagination.” It added, “It also has become a stark symbol of the nation’s gun violence epidemic. Ten of the 17 deadliest U.S. mass shootings since 2012 have involved AR-15s.”
In a companion piece, N. Kirkpatrick, Atthar Mirza and Manuel Canales had “The Blast Effect,” which shows exactly the damage that bullets from an AR-15 can have on the human body. Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee wrote, “We recognize that this presentation may disturb readers, but we determined the information it contains is critical to the public’s knowledge. Two principles shaped our approach: to show the impact on a body with precision and to share our findings through visualizations that meet our ethical standards. To accomplish that, we decided it was essential to document and depict actual mortal wounds to actual victims, using animated illustrations that show the entrance and exit wounds in human figures.”
Normally, you might think that the Post publishing a detailed and massive project on an assault rifle just hours before a mass school shooting involving two assault rifles was a haunting and remarkable coincidence. Except there is no such thing as coincidences when it comes to mass shootings. They have become all too common. The fact that the Post ran a story about assault weapons on a day of a mass shooting wasn’t surprising at all.
Washington Post reporter John Woodrow Cox, who has reported extensively on gun violence and its impact on children, tweeted, “I was on a middle school campus, following a girl who has been haunted for half her life by the horror of a school shooting, when the news from Nashville appeared on my phone. I’m running out of words.”
National reporters were all over this story as it renewed the debate on gun control in this country — a seemingly daily debate that doesn’t shift even after children are murdered.
At the top of Monday’s “CBS Evening News,” anchor Norah O’Donnell said, “It’s all a chilling reminder about the leading cause of death for America’s children: guns. For decades, it was car accidents that were the main cause. Well, not anymore. Since 2020, firearms overtook crashes as the No. 1 cause of death for kids.”
In one dramatic scene that played out on the livestream picked up by Fox News, one woman called out Republicans’ opposition to gun reform. She told reporters, “Aren’t you guys tired of covering this? Aren’t you guys tired of being here and having to cover all of these mass shootings?”
Rep. Andrew Ogles (R-Tenn.), who represents the Nashville district where the school is located, said in a statement that he was “utterly heartbroken” by the shooting. But social media — and this story in The Washington Post — showed that Ogles’ family Christmas card in 2021 had him, his wife and two of his three children holding rifles.
Biden called on Congress to pass an assault weapons ban. He said, “(we) need to do more to protect our schools. … It’s about time we began to make some more progress.”
Local coverage of the shooting was impactful and important. My Poynter colleague, Al Tompkins — who also is a former TV director and news reporter in Nashville — noted in a tweet, “Journalists on Nashville TV have such close personal connections with this shooting. Over and over they say they know people whose children attended that school, they know people who worked there. It is invaluable for newsrooms to have journalists who KNOW their community.”
Tompkins also published this piece Monday: “Making sense of another mass shooting in America.”
I’ll have more media reactions to Monday’s shooting in the days ahead.
The pope’s puffer jacket?
For this item, I turn it over to my colleague, Alex Mahadevan, director of the MediaWise project at Poynter.
This weekend, we may have seen the first big artificial intelligence misinformation moment — featuring the pope and a puffer jacket.
An image allegedly showing a swagged-out Pope Francis in a designer coat went viral Saturday. It was actually created with the AI image generator Midjourney and posted to Reddit. I was fooled. As was Chrissy Teigen and nearly half of the 240,000 users polled by science influencer Hank Green.
A quick glance at the image reveals the telltale sign of AI: Digitally mangled hands. But I scrolled right past, later mentioning the pope’s Balenciaga drip to my wife.
Last week, similarly-created images of Donald Trump being arrested also went viral — though failed to fool the same volume of people. Why? Should we be scared of a new flood of AI misinformation making it impossible to separate fact from fiction online?
Not really. Here’s why I think so many people fell for the Balenciaga pope:
- The pope is usually pretty swagged out. I didn’t think twice, nor did I think the puffer was that weird in context.
- The stakes are low: There’s not much harm in sharing a fake photo of a pope’s fit. What’s the point of taking the extra second to zoom in on a harmless pic of the pope?
- It’s apolitical: If you’ve ever used Community Notes on Twitter, you know that the second someone tweets something misleading about a politician, folks from the other side of the aisle will flood the platform with fact checks. We didn’t see the immediate backlash that political misinformation elicits.
The latter two points inform my thinking about the whole ordeal: We’re still some time from a large-scale, harmful AI misinformation event. Something that measurably disrupts real life. Fact-checkers and journalists, in my opinion, are ready for such a scenario.
As I mentioned in a misinformation workshop I led Monday, conspiracy theories, out-of-context videos and stupid memes are still much more of a threat to the information ecosystem.
A real moment
Damage is seen on properties in Rolling Fork, Miss., where a tornado ripped through the town Friday night. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
Meteorologist Matt Laubhan of WTVA in Mississippi was live on the air Friday night as a devastating storm was rushing across the state. In a moment that has since become viral, Laubhan was stopped cold when he saw the radar and what was headed toward a town called Amory.
“Oh man,” Laubhan said as he slumped elbow-first onto his news desk. “Dear Jesus, please help them. Amen.”
Not only was it a real moment of humanity, but it was a stark warning to viewers as to what was happening.
The tornado killed at least 26 people, injured dozens more and flattened entire blocks. The mayor of Rolling Fork said his town is “gone.” Winds there are estimated to have reached 170 mph.
Here’s more from CNN’s Aya Elamroussi, Joe Sutton, Rebekah Riess, Sharif Paget, Mallika Kallingal and Alaa Elassar.
A Texas stunner
After 68 years, The Texas Observer is closing down and laying off all of its 17-person staff. In an all-encompassing piece by The Texas Tribune, Sewell Chan and Brandon Formby called the Observer a “storied progressive publication known for its feisty, combative and often humorous investigative journalism.”
Former staffer Olivia Messer, in a story for The Daily Beast, called it “the great incubator of national industry talent and Lone Star State muckraker.”
Messer added the news was met with “a wave of fury, sadness, and hopelessness washed over the state’s press corps. Nationally recognized journalists called the closure everything from an ‘ego-driven tantrum’ to a ‘damn shame,’ and it seems they’re just getting started. Some aren’t ready to give up on the historic magazine.”
Chan and Formby wrote, “The closing of the Observer raises questions about whether small progressive publications can survive the digital transformation of journalism and the information ecosystem during a time of rapid social, demographic and technological change.”
The Tribune reported that the Observer’s board considered moving to an online-only news outlet. That, along with a few layoffs, would have reduced the annual budget from $2.1 million to $1.5 million. The Observer does not accept advertising and because there was a struggle to increase donors and subscribers, the decision was made to close operations altogether.
Robert R. Frump, who left the board last summer to run the magazine’s business operations as a special adviser, resigned in protest last week when informed of the board’s decision. He told the Tribune, “The editorial quality of the Texas Observer is excellent, and it deserves to live on in some format. It has a unique voice that’s progressive but hews to the truth. I‘m hoping some version of it can still survive.”
Be sure to check out the Tribune’s story for more details on the closing of the Observer, as well as its rich history.
Fox News producer fired
Last week, I wrote about the Fox News producer who accused lawyers at Fox of pressuring her into giving misleading testimony in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News. Abby Grossberg, a producer for Maria Bartiromo and then later Tucker Carlson, also described a toxic environment of misogyny and antisemitism.
She has now been fired by Fox News. According to her lawyers, Fox News’ official reason for firing her was she “improperly disclosed information regarding the Dominion/Fox Lawsuit that the Company purportedly believed was privileged.”
In a statement, Fox News said, “Like most organizations, Fox News Media’s attorneys engage in privileged communications with our employees as necessary to provide legal advice. Last week, our attorneys advised Ms. Grossberg that, while she was free to file whatever legal claims she wished, she was in possession of our privileged information and was not authorized to disclose it publicly. We were clear that if she violated our instructions, Fox would take appropriate action including termination. Ms. Grossberg ignored these communications and chose to file her complaint without taking any steps to protect those portions containing Fox’s privileged information. We will continue to vigorously defend Fox against Ms. Grossberg’s unmeritorious legal claims, which are riddled with false allegations against Fox and our employees.”
As we move closer to a possible trial in mid-April, Jim Geraghty — a National Review senior political correspondent — wrote in The Washington Post: “Why the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News isn’t a slam dunk.”
Geraghty wrote, “The news network sounds like a pit of vipers. You could get the impression from the lavish media attention paid to these revelations that the internal communications were just the sort of smoking-gun evidence Dominion needed to clinch its case.”
“But,” Geraghty continued, “at issue in the lawsuit is not whether you like Fox News, or whether you think it did a good job of covering Trump’s claims that the election was stolen, or whether Fox employees thought their co-workers belonged in an asylum. At issue is whether any of the potentially defamatory statements about Dominion came from Fox News employees, rather than guests such as Trump, Giuliani and Powell, and whether Fox hosts’ comments were knowingly false statements of fact, rather than expressions of opinion.”
Actually, Dominion could — and likely will — argue that Fox News put guests on the air knowing that they would spread false information about the 2020 election, and that they could have done more to stop election lies from being said on their network.
Fox has claimed all along that Donald Trump and those close to him were saying the election was rigged, that it was news that they were saying this, and it was their job to cover that news.
Does Dominion have a slam dunk case? No. Should Fox News be worried? They certainly have reason to be.
An eyebrow-raising departure
Jim Trotter is one of the most respected NFL reporters. Even though he worked for the league at NFL Media Group, that didn’t stop him from doggedly reporting on the league, including its lack of diversity, particularly in leadership positions. At this year’s Super Bowl for the second year in a row, Trotter asked tough questions to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.
On Monday, Trotter tweeted, “Some personal news: This will be my final week with the NFL Media Group. I was informed over the weekend that my contract is not being renewed. I thank NFL Network and NFL.com for the lessons learned and affirmed over the last five years.”
New York Post sportswriter Ryan Glasspiegel reported earlier this month that NFL Media was in “the midst of a strategic review that will result in major cost cuts.”
Hard to believe for a league that seemingly prints money and has one of the most successful TV products of all time. But the NFL also is reportedly freezing pay raises for some executives.
Still, there is some buzz that Trotter’s no-holds-barred journalism rubbed the NFL the wrong way and led to his contract not being renewed.
Deadspin’s Carron J. Phillips wrote, “Only a fool would think this a coincidence.”
ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio, who is plugged into the league, wrote, “It will be interesting to hear whether Trotter believes his departure arises from being too journalistic for the league’s liking. While the NFL surely isn’t foolish enough to articulate to its in-house reporters the existence of a line that can’t be crossed, the NFL should be going the other way, repeatedly reminding on-the-payroll reporters that they can cover freely and aggressively any aspect of league business, no matter how embarrassing it may be to Big Shield.”
Media tidbits
CBS News’ Vladimir Duthiers, on the set of “CBS Mornings” on Monday. (Courtesy: CBS News)
- Vladimir Duthiers has been named a featured host at “CBS Mornings.” Here’s a clip of the announcement. Duthiers also will continue to anchor “CBS News Live” on the CBS News Streaming Network.
- The New York Times’ Ryan Mac and Kate Conger with “Twitter Says Parts of Its Source Code Were Leaked Online.”
- New MSNBC host Jen Psaki is off to a good start on her Sunday show, “Inside with Jen Psaki.” The former Biden White House press secretary showed her carving skills Sunday in her second show by going after Republicans such as Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan in this clip, as well as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in this clip.
- Jerry Green, a legendary sportswriter at The Detroit News and the last reporter to cover every Super Bowl, died last week. He was 94. Green covered the first 51 Super Bowls before missing the most recent one in February. He joined the Detroit News in 1963 after starting at The Associated Press. He was among the handful of reporters sitting poolside in Miami with Joe Namath when the quarterback guaranteed his New York Jets would beat the heavily-favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. The Detroit News’ Tony Paul has more.
Hot type
- CNN’s John Blake with “What’s ‘digital blackface?’ And why is it wrong when White people use it?”
- Interesting analysis from The Washington Post’s Andrew Van Dam: “The political leanings of people who go on cruises, and more!”
- Finally, today, a warning. This is an R-rated item. Very R-rated. Extremely R-rated. About as R-rated as you can get. If you’re easily offended by language, don’t read this. Got it? I don’t want any complaints. You’ve been warned. But if you’re a fan of the HBO show “Succession,” you’ll love this. The Ringer with “A Ranking of the Best F-words in ‘Succession’ History.”
More resources for journalists
- Time for a new job? Your future employer is looking for you on The Media Job Board — Powered by Poynter, Editor & Publisher and America’s Newspapers. Search now!
- Poynter’s Beat Academy (March-Oct.) (Webinar series) — Enroll now.
- Telling the Stories of Faith and the Faithful — Los Angeles, April 18 (Seminar) — Register by April 3.
- Editorial Integrity and Leadership Initiative — (Sept. – April, 2024) (Hybrid) — Apply by May 15.
Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at tjones@poynter.org.
The Poynter Report is our daily media newsletter. To have it delivered to your inbox Monday-Friday, sign up here.
