Conversation

I've found the reporting on this story super weird. I mean, it would have to be. The standard rules don't work here.

The reports I've seen are treating it like they do when a pretty and well-liked student gets shot in a robbery or something, complete with the middle section about how kind and generous the victim was — and I have to believe even the staunchest libertarian would struggle to forget that literally the only thing anyone knows about this guy is that he made billions of dollars by depriving people of life-saving medicine.

If he'd just been sternly rebuked, that section would have read "Thompson was CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a $500 billion company in the US health insurance industry, which experts estimate causes one death every twelve minutes", but quite reasonably journalists have rules against saying anything that makes a murderer sound based as fuck. But the system Thompson represented is so self-evidently evil, how can you report on this *without* the reader rooting for the shooter?

But, you know, they never care about that when they're reporting about, say, Hamas generals being killed. They never get a eulogy from surviving friends and family. If you see it as a one-off shooting, sure, the current reporting makes sense, but if it's the first real retaliation in a class war that's already claimed countless lives then the current reporting looks like taking sides.

Which, of course, it is. In a class war between billionaires and the working class, the news media aren't exactly Switzerland. Besides, we already know the US media are singularly incapable of adjusting their reporting to a world where the old rules no longer work.

Who knows what's next 🤷