John Stoehr at Salon wrote this excellent piece about the media's use of the word "assassination" to describe the recent killing of two NYPD officers.
Stoehr writes:
We have seen “assassination” used to characterize the killing of two New York City police officers. New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton that evening said: “They were, quite simply, assassinated.” Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, on “Fox and Friends,” said: “What happened yesterday was an assassination.” News media in New York and elsewhere blindly followed suit. Sean Hannity, CBS News, the New York Daily News, USA Today and Newsday all used “assassination” indiscriminately. The San Antonio Express-News ran an editorial with this astounding headline: “No Other Word for It—Assassination.”
The NYPD killings were horrible and tragic. The media and certain public figures seem to be trying to fan them into a political war, however.
Stoehr describes assassination in the following way:
An assassination is malicious and premeditated, but it is much more. It “involves the murder of a politically important or prominent individual by surprise attack,” according to the AP Stylebook. Moreover, an “assassin” is “a politically motivated killer” not a “killer” who “kills with a motive of any kind” or a “murderer” who is convicted of the crime. Taken together, these rules exclude more than they include. John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. John Lennon and Tupac Shakur were not. Lee Harvey Oswald was an assassin. His killer, Jack Ruby, was not.
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan and failed.
The killing of two NYPD officers was murder or premeditated murder.
Certain public figures are trying to turn the killings into something they're not. They're politicizing the deaths and using them to attack the police reform movement. By characterizing the deaths as "assassinations" these figures try to demonize the reform movement by linking them to "assassins".
Stoehr writes that it goes even further than that:
They have advanced the view that anything that representatives of the government perceive to be a threat must be suppressed by the government even if that “threat” is an honest effort to petition the government for a redress of grievances. As the head of one of New York’s police unions said, “[The movement] must not go on. It cannot be tolerated.” In this view, no one can protest anything if the police feel threatened.
How did these same public figures talk about the killing of Michael Brown? Why didn't they call his killing an "assassination"? Or a "government endorsed assassination"?
Why aren't these figures flocking to the airwaves to talk about the attempted assassination of NAACP members in the recent bombing in Colorado Springs (an actual politically motivated attack)?
Be aware of the distinction and be careful not to repeat right-wing messaging when talking about the NYPD killings.
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David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy.