It’s getting hard to tell the Jokers from the fascists
Six hundred-plus mass shootings this year alone in the United States, on top of the 680 in 2021, the 610 in 2020 (I could go on), have spawned a new type of reporter: the “mass shooting correspondent.” Blood, victims, families, survivors. Career opportunities are built on growing piles of bodies.
Michelle Wolf of WAVY-TV News had covered a mass shooting in Charlottesville, Va. just 10 days before her police scanner alerted her to another at a Chesapeake, Va. Walmart this week.
“Nothing ever prepares you for when it happens,” Wolf said of the horror and chaos. “It hits you differently every single time.”
Greg Sargent writes (Washington Post):
When it comes to covering these mini war zones, reporters on the home front are beginning to sound like veteran correspondents. After a man with an AR-15 killed five people in an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs last weekend, Ashley Michels, a reporter at a Denver TV station, offered some grimly revealing testimony.
“Unfortunately, I have covered mass shootings multiple times in my career,” Michels tweeted. She posted examples of vitriolic messages she received for covering that mass killing, adding, “This is the first time I can recall getting message after message from viewers like this.”
The vile, deranged hate directed at LGBTQ victims was new to Michels. The experience of covering a mass shooting was not.
Wolf and Michels are only two reporters with growing resumes in covering mass murder and maimings. Doing their jobs is “a very fine balance,” says PBS NewsHour producer and correspondent William Brangham. Reporters stand beside sobbing families mourning their dead and others desperately seeking friends and loved ones who might be lying in pools of blood behind police lines. Or not.
Reporting on such scenes is now a specialty.
I haven’t looked. Has anyone been assaulted or killed yet in Black Friday mayhem?
But back to what Michels said about hate aimed at LGBTQ victims. It’s not just that there are more guns than people in the U.S. It’s that into that explosives-filled space we have hatemongers gleefully flicking lit matches and then standing back to see what explodes. From “the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, his boss Ben Shapiro, and Candace Owens” to Nick Fuentes and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to Tucker Carlson and Chaya Raichik.
“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn,” Alfred Pennyworth tells Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight to explain The Joker. In this country it’s getting harder every day to tell the Jokers from the fascists who sow hate and chaos because they do want power.