Did the NYT Boost Mass Shootings in 2020-23?

In 2020, the New York Times ran over six articles per day mentioning "Black Lives Matter." Mass shootings shot up. Coincidence?

The Black Lives Matter hashtag was coined during the Trayvon Martin brouhaha of 2012, but the phrase “Black Lives Matter” never appeared in the New York Times until a couple of weeks after Michael Brown’s death Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014:

“Black Lives Matter” was then included in 29 more NYT articles in 2014, and now has been in 6,392 since Ferguson.

The peak was in 2020 with 2,298 articles referring to Black Lives Matter, more than six articles per day! Even 2021 saw three articles per days about BLM.

Since then, the NYT has managed to calm itself down to around one article per day or slightly less. (2025 is projected for the whole year at the recent rate.)

An important question is what impact did this national freakout over Black Lives Matter among, say, the 11 million paying subscribers of the NYT have on black lives (and deaths) on the street. (I’m using the New York Times to symbolize the respectable media in general.)

Offhand, there might not seem to be a direct connection. Murderers probably aren’t big New York Times subscribers on the whole. But the NYT and other respectable news media do have a sizable effect on policy.

So, measuring New York Times trends seems like a decent measure of how hysterical the American Establishment got over time.

Let’s also look at one up-to-date measure that correlates strongly with black on black gun violence: mass shootings with four or more killed and/or wounded.

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