Reporter resigns after falsely tweeting that Maryland shooter wore MAGA hat
If the first casualty of war is the truth, it is also a casualty in the wake of any recent mass shooting in America.
It has become de rigueur for both sides to heap responsibility for a mass shooting on the backs of their political opponents. Trying to make political hay out of a tragedy used to be an infamia – no one would dare use the bodies of innocent people to make a political point.
Those days are in the past. Even if the shooter is demonstrably insane or mentally incompetent, there are always nuggets of information that can be unearthed in the shooter's past that will tie him to one side or the other. And sometimes both.
A reporter in Springfield, Massachusetts thought he was just playing the blame game when he tweeted that the man who killed five people in a Maryland newsroom "left behind" a MAGA hat. The intent was clear: blame the president's tirades against journalists for the massacre.
But the reporter's newspaper reacted swiftly and decisively. The 21-year veteran newspaperman was fired.
Backlash was swift. Berry deleted the tweet and apologized in a follow-up tweet Friday morning.
"Folks, My 21-year career as a 'journalist,' a fancy term that makes my skin crawl, frankly, came to a screeching halt yesterday with one stupid, regrettable tweet," Barry wrote. "Can't take it back; wish I could. My since[re] apologies to all good, hardworking reporters and to POTUS supporters."
Berry told the Boston Globe that the tweet was intended to be a "snarky, sarcastic, cynical remark."
In his resignation letter, Berry conceded that his tweet "taints the good work of fair-minded journalists everywhere." ...
Berry was not the first journalist to apologize for a tweet suggesting that the president or one of his supporters shared resonsibility for Thurday's massacre.
Reuters reporter Rob Cox tweeted Thursday, "This is what happens when @realDonaldTrump calls journalists the enemy of the people. Blood is your hands, Mr. President. Save your thoughts and prayers for your empty soul."
The tweet was later deleted.
Berry and Cox were not alone in laying blame for the shootings on Trump. In fact, the spurious charge became the de facto position on the left for who or what was responsible for the massacre overnight.
"Seems to me that shooting up a newsroom is a natural extension of proclaiming that our worst enemies are those reporting news we don't like that we decide to propagandize as 'fake,'" writer and public speaker Scott Santens tweeted. "The violence today lies at Trump's feet. The blood in Annapolis is on his hate-feeding hands."
#Resistance activist Amy Siskind went directly to the social media police to get President Trump's Twitter account deleted. Notifying Twitter, Twitter Safety, and Jack Dorsey (Twitter cofounder and CEO), she declared, "tweets sent from your platform by [Donald Trump] led to 5 targeted deaths today. Remove his account!"
O'Neill has several more gems along exactly the same line. This despite the fact that the newsroom shooter, by all accounts, wasn't even thinking of Trump when he pulled the trigger:
A man with the same name had unsuccessfully sued the paper for defamation over a story that reported he had stalked a woman online; he ended up pleading guilty for criminal harassment as a result. He also for years apparently used a Twitter account to post threatening messages about the Capital and its then-staffer that wrote the 2011 story, along with people involved with the case. He also posted violent imagery and called the 2015 shooting of cartoonists at the French publication Charlie Hebdo a "funny thing."
Mass shooters almost always have no other agenda than whatever their imaginations have conjured up – the exception being Muslim terrorists who know exactly what they're doing and whom they're targeting. In this case, a grievance became an obsession that led to violence. Politics played absolutely no role in the deaths of these five innocent people.
One wonders why this blame game continues. No one from the either side changes his mind about who is responsible. Most other Americans are repelled by this exercise in futility. But as America careens toward violent conflict between the two sides, the blame game will escalate and could eventually lead to tit-for-tat altercations. Violence will beget violence, reaction to counter-reaction.
Only losers will be left standing.