CAMERA BLOG
New York Times Downplays Dee Family Murders, Continuing a Pattern
Gilead Ini
April 14, 2023

…It is a compelling, crushing story. And yet the New York Times didn’t highlight the latest killings in its vague headline, which mentioned only “tensions.” It didn’t report on the attack in any proportion to its importance, with just four paragraphs of its a 35-paragraph story focused on the attack. It didn’t draw attention to the tragic pattern of sibling deaths in a human-interest story. The paper never even mentioned the names of the sisters, Maia and Rina Dee. Not only did the paper not name the mother, Lucy Dee, but it didn’t report on her subsequent death. Of course, all of these — human-interest stories, headlines, paragraphs, personalizing details — are in the newspaper’s arsenal of tools to help it communicate (or in their absence, deemphasize) the importance of a story. READ MORE