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.
Paywall here.
The Gun Violence Archive is a crowd-sourced website that tries to count all the shooting deaths in the country and all the mass shootings. It’s much faster than government sources such as FBI murder counts (which have a lag of over 8 months) and CDC homicide death counts (which are lagged by 6 months to let coroners have time to work — so we still don’t have CDC homicide totals for all of 2024 yet). The 2025 estimate is a projection that assumes the last 52% of 2025 will have the same rate as the first 48%.
As I’ve been pointing out for years, mass shootings come in two main varieties:
The rarer but more famous mass shootings where the shooter (almost always one person, although the most famous example, Columbine, featured two shooters) has made up his mind that he’s never coming home, so he hangs around to finish off the wounded. These are the highly publicized school shootings, church shootings, Going Postal workplace shootings, and the like. (There is also a less heavily covered subtype: the family extinction domestic slaughter.)
These type of mass shootings usually generate more dead than wounded.
They usually take place during the daytime. The shooters tend to be pretty representative demographically of younger males, with lots of white shooters, but also Asians, Hispanics, and blacks.
In contrast, the most common type of mass shootings generate more wounded than dead.
These tend to be ones where the shooter (or often shooters) wants to kill one or more particular people, but wants to get away with his crime. So, when he hears sirens, he skedaddles. The surviving wounded might be his intended targets that he didn’t have time to finish off, or they might just be random collateral damage.
Some of these are planned out (e.g., drive-by shootings) and others are spontaneous (e.g., somebody takes exception to a diss and starts shooting in the general direction of the disser).
These second type of mass shootings tend to take place at night, especially on weekends, often at social events: e.g., Saturday night outside a hip-hop nightclub.
The demographics of shooters and victims are extremely black: the New York Times did a study of all four or more wounded or dead mass shootings in 2015 and determined that “nearly three-fourths of victims and suspected assailants whose race could be identified were black.”
There’s one type of mass shooting that’s hard to categorize on these dimensions: the Kill All the Witnesses kind of money-driven crime, like the St. Valentine’s Day massacre of 1929, the Brown’s Chicken massacre of seven fast food employees in 1993, and the recent extermination of seven Laotians at a Southern California marijuana farm a few years ago. Fortunately, these kind of cold-blooded massacres haven’t really caught on in America.
The giant number of Black Lives Matter articles in 2020-2021 coincided with a four year plateau from 2020 through 2023 of mass shootings, which has now fallen back to roughly the level of 2018.
In the social sciences, a correlation of 0.54 is often thought of as pretty strong. Not super-strong, but worth thinking about.
What about causality? Could the explosion of black on black mass shootings since Ferguson have caused the New York Times to run countless articles on the theme of how Black Lives Matter has led to huge increases in Black Lives Murdered?
Yeah, sure …
Seriously, that’s the kind of news that doesn’t fit.
Perhaps indirectly, in that nice liberal whites bought into the idea that hundreds of scholars and aspiring rappers were being mowed down by the cops every year, so depolicing is a great idea that will save innocent black lives and not have any negative downstream effects for society at large.
One of the hallmarks of elite whites and their institutions is that they really do not understand the people they claim to care about and adopt narratives that boost status but are divorced from unpleasant facts. Given their influence this has given fuel to massive errors in our culture and politics, and attempts to correct them are painted as retrograde bigotry.
Absolutely. We hate-readers of the NYT call it the Fox Butterfied effect. I've been writing about it forever at my old eponymous blog and on now-disappeared podcasts. I wrote an entire dissertation about it and had to threaten to sue to matriculate. Oddly, a truly principled free-speech socialist law professor, and a conservative, famous, former feminist/Stalinist professor were equally helpful in advising me to apply the right pressure. I hate everyone else at that hellmouth of a purported school. Including the fake conservatives now high-ranking in Conservatism, Inc.
The Times has promotes falsehoods about rehabilitation and de-incarceration since the mid-Sixties crime wave ramped up. They have advocated for the release and valorization of leftist and minority domestic terrorists since the late Sixties, and, much more destructively by body count, legislation based on that ideology to de-incarcerate and selectively demonize police, and not the police's leftist elected superiors. It is the decent poor and others of all races who suffer.
I could, and have, said a lot more, but to offer just a few examples, see the much-revised Kitty Genovese books by NTY editor Abe Rosenthal falsely blaming her neighbors; efforts by the Times to release Weathermen and BLA or more importantly hide their real crimes (Bernardine Dohrn is a killer and Michelle Obama's ten-year keeper -- yet her last Times story was about how she loves feeding her kids home-made jam. Dohrn used a false ID at a baby shop to rent the cars for the Brinks murders. Ayers, Obama's 8-year almostly nightly mentor, was only prevented from killing many blacks and whites in Detroit by the courageous FBI plant Larry Grathwohl, RIP. The Times has also advocated for the release or repatriation of every elite cop-killer terrorist for decades, from Marilyn Buck to Angela Davis to Susan Rosenberg and many others). This all reinforces a toxic, upper-class zeitgeist.
The Times has been promoting divisive racialist root-causes and other idiotic Butterman themes that do not match marriage, crime, and other early-Sixties statistical racial normalization, for more than 50 years. They use their stable of upper and middle-class columnists to sow and recredential race hatred and murder -- by blacks, of whites and blacks.
I think James Baldwin would puke at their willingness to help foment more race hatred and justify black-on-black killing culture. Absolutely vomit. And then there's the Chicago papers, bravely opposed by former cop Martin Prieb; Boston journalists supporting torturer-rapist Benjamin LaGuer, even after the DNA proved him guilty: both Noam Chomsky and conservative hero John Silber supported releasing LaGuer anyway, and Silber gave him an honorary degree despite acknowledging his guilt. Silber actually said that LaGuer should be released despite being guilty because the rapist had convinced himself that he was innocent. The one journalist honest enough to contact me after the DNA said that he went to bed, pulled the covers over his head, and mourned for a week after the DNA. He had demonized the elderly victim for being a racist though she easily identified her attacker, as he was living next door with his dad. The city turned on her; it is suspected the mayor helped LaGuer patch through a call to her deathbed, pretending to be a priest, then sexually and racially abused her more over the phone. From prison.
The serial killer I survived was released early five times, and the ACLU got his life sentence
overturned on a miniscule paperwork error. I've checked his status every week for decades. I'll be there if he ever gets out. The media is the new KKK. We are half a century into a new lynching era. Of course they are responsible for the rise in violence. We should start naming and databasing their victims.