At 2:23 p.m. Eastern time on Sept. 10, Charlie Kirk was shot at a college in Utah, and New York Times journalists began grappling with a series of questions and decisions. What happened? Were graphic videos of his injuries real? Which facts could we confirm without reporters on the scene yet?
At 3:01 p.m., we published confirmation of the shooting, and a new round of judgment calls began: Would we show clips of Kirk’s shooting? What words and shorthand would we use for him in headlines — a “right-wing provocateur,” a “conservative activist” or something else? What parts of his ideology — popular on the right, loathed on the left — would we include in coverage?
About 90 minutes later, the Times reporter Robert Draper confirmed Kirk’s death with his spokesperson, and our homepage changed to a banner headline with a new verb: “assassinated.”
Over the next six days, we published more than 100 pieces about Kirk. That’s a lot for someone many Americans did not know. But this was not only a story about one man being murdered, it was a story about political violence, a polarized society, free speech, the president and a cascade of consequences, from growing fury on the right to, most recently, the suspension of a late-night TV comedian for his comments about Kirk.
It is also a story that has drawn intense interest from readers. The day of the shooting, searches related to Kirk’s death eclipsed any other news topic this year, according to Google. Our audience was double what we would typically see on a Wednesday in September, and much bigger even than for other huge news events, like when Pope Francis died or when Donald J. Trump was shot while campaigning for president.
Since Kirk’s assassination, we have received many comments and questions from readers about our coverage. So we gathered some of the key journalists involved to shed light on how we approached it and made some of our judgment calls.
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The post Inside The Times’s Reporting and Judgment Calls on Charlie Kirk’s Assassination appeared first on New York Times.
