There was another mass shooting in America today, an occurrence now so bleakly common that we could probably just go back to one of our other stories about one and copy and paste some text here, instead of writing a new description. Today’s incident—which killed at least five people, and wounded many more—took place in Annapolis, Maryland this afternoon, as a gunman opened fire on the offices of Capital Gazette Publishing, publisher of multiple newspapers in the Annapolis area.
Well-practiced at this point, the media has already moved through most of the normal motions of its post-mass-shooting response, interviewing survivors, speculating on motives, and assembling details about the alleged shooter. (Supposedly, a man with a long-standing grudge with one of the publishers’ papers.) Some small kudos is in order to CNN, though, which made a decision to respect the survivor’s words and emotions today, in defiance of usual standards of “decorum” (or maybe “civility”). Specifically (and understandably) Selene San Felice—a reporter who covered the Pulse nightclub shootings in 2016, and who says she prayed every moment she was huddled under a desk today—said “fuck” multiple times during her description of the day’s events, and CNN chose not to bleep it out. (A departure from the network’s usual policies.)
The first “fuck” was purely journalistic, really, as San Felice described what appear to have been the final words of colleague John McNamara, a “What the fuck?” as the gunshots rang out. But the second instance cut more calmly to the heart of the matter, and served as a reminder that there are really no words more offensive than the repeated, soul-sucking horror that news outlets sometimes have to report on now as a matter of course: A pained “Thanks for your prayers, but I couldn’t give a fuck about them if there’s nothing else” directed at all of those—especially Donald Trump—whose support for survivors starts and ends with thoughts and words, not actions or political change.
You can hear San Felice’s description of the day in the following tweets. Strong fucking language is involved.