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Annapolis Shooting: Thoughts and prayers won’t do anything
Friday 29th June 2018 | Toms
Five dead in the Capital Gazette shooting in America. A man entered the newsroom with a shotgun and smoke grenades, and opened fire on the staff.
‘I’m going to need more than a couple days of news coverage and some thoughts and prayers, because it’s our whole lives have been shattered. And so thanks for your prayers, but I couldn’t give a fuck about them if there’s nothing else’ said Selene San Felice, one of the staff writers.
In a defiant move, the newspaper pushed through with their journalistic duties, and published an issue the following day documenting the atrocities that happened in their headquarters.
President Donald Trump on the other hand offered his ‘thoughts and prayers’ to the victims and their families, while avoiding questions about the shooting from journalists.
The bigger question here is if the ‘War on Fake News’ plays a part? When the President of one of the leading nations in the world continues to discredit any sort of news he disagrees with, and other figureheads of the right such as Milo Yiannopoulos, make off-hand comments such as ‘I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight’ (only two days before the shooting), we should take a look at how the people of the right choose to mobilise.
Header photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP
