You don’t have to say something about every terrible thing
There is grace in giving people space, and wisdom in not taking the bait from those who seek to provoke you.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk was terrifying, and my heart goes out to his family.
I’ve found the videos of the assassination hard to shake off — that Kirk was shot in cold blood for political speech on a university campus in front of thousands of onlookers. I’ve tried to avoid close-up angles of the event, but that’s harder on social media than it ought to be.
I didn’t know Charlie, and our political views didn’t overlap so much. But there’s an implicit fraternity among people who write or speak about politics for a living. I spent the day at Iowa State University yesterday, including giving a public talk in front of an audience of several hundred people in the evening. It went well: Ames, Iowa and the pretty ISU campus are eerily reminiscent of East Lansing, Michigan and the MSU campus where I grew up. I had no reason to feel threatened. But I spent some nervous moments scanning the crowd and scrutinizing the scene in a way I never had before.
I always found this type of story difficult to cover when I was playing more of an editing role at FiveThirtyEight. Defining what I mean by “this type of story” is slightly fraught — but I’m referring basically to acts of targeted violence, including but not limited to political violence, terrorist attacks, school shootings, riots, and police brutality against civilians. These events are both highly traumatizing and often become focal points for political discourse that can be an order of magnitude larger than their direct impact.
Here at Silver Bulletin, we aren’t making any pretense of covering the entire spectrum of political news; we pick and choose our topics. At FiveThirtyEight, with a staff of a couple dozen people, not covering a story felt like more of a deliberate choice. Of course, there was always considerable disagreement about what we should cover and how. I don’t think we ever figured out what the “data journalism” take on these stories was supposed to be. In the immediate aftermath, people aren't looking for a bunch of charts. While, in principle, there can be empirical angles — is this terrible thing that happened part of a rising trend? — they aren’t really looking for that either.
So let me say something that will undoubtedly feel hypocritical given that we’re now several paragraphs into this: you don’t have to say something about every damned terrible thing that happened.
By “you”, I’m referring to the community of people who comment on political events, rather than reporters who cover hard news. If you work for The New York Times or the Salt Lake Tribune, you’re in a different position.
As part of that community, I believe it would be helpful to establish a permission structure to clarify that not commenting on an event does not imply a lack of concern.
Nearly every politics-adjacent Substack I subscribe to has had some extended comment on Kirk’s assassination, as have the podcasts I listen to, and so forth. But I have to be honest: the batting average for these stories has not been super high. In some instances, they’ve left me with a lower opinion of the author than I came in with. Many are just a little too self-conscious about defining the author's place in the moral and political pecking order, at triangulating precisely whose side one is on.
True, not covering a story is sometimes a sign that you think it deserves less attention. But there are other valid reasons for restraint, most importantly that you’re still processing the news or that you don’t have much to add at the moment beyond saying that what happened was terrible. Part of the value in not immediately commenting on every story is that you don’t establish a precedent where it becomes conspicuous when you sit one out.
You should also ask whether the instinct toward quick reaction can add fuel to the fire. Escalation into worse outcomes can be sort of an autoimmune response from overaggressive defense. Generally speaking, bad news happens quickly while good news happens slowly. Good news, in fact, is often just the absence of bad news: that the terrible thing that happened yesterday didn’t happen again.
In any sort of long-term relationship — with a spouse, or a coworker, or a friend — giving things time to settle down is an essential coping strategy. When people are on a knife-edge, even what you think are the most carefully-selected words can spark an adverse, fight-or-flight reaction and provide a rationalization to escalate. We wouldn’t survive for very long as a civilization if we didn’t provide for cooling-off periods.
The endorphin rush that social media provides makes all of this harder. In the presence of abnormal stress, we may seek sustenance in small, algorithmically reinforced wins. I’m not above this: I’ll admit to finding satisfaction when, say, a person I don’t like says something dumb and gets dogpiled for it. But I’m not proud of this; it reflects my baser instincts and not my better ones.
So, no, you don’t have to send that tweet. You can keep the conversation in the friend circle or the group chat.
Or you can wait for more evidence to come in. And you probably should, because these types of stories are notorious for early speculation — especially as to the identity or motivations of the perpetrators — that winds up being embarrassingly wrong.
True, there is often a prize for being among the first to shape the narrative. The first draft of the story can be sticky and hard to debunk, the facts be damned. But that's an impulse drawn from PR and not journalism.
You are entitled to have a messy, human reaction. You don’t have to put a neat bow on things. You shouldn’t let anyone bully you into saying something you don’t believe, or coerce you into saying nothing when you feel an obligation to speak up. You don’t have to care what everyone else thinks. In the midst of distributing news, we’re all sort of making it up as we go along. I consider myself a moralistic person, in the sense that I have strong personal and political values that I’ve thought a lot about. But one of those values, broadly speaking, is tolerance. Another is a classically Midwestern trait of somewhat reserving judgment, particularly when people are enduring difficult circumstances. I’m not religious, but these aren’t so far from what a Christian might call “grace”.
You’ll need to be aware that, to some degree, you’ll be ceding the playing field to those who haven’t adopted this mindset. The worst are full of passionate intensity. But the alternative is to play their game by their rules — and usually, it’s a trap. Their goal is to provoke you, and they’re pretty good at it. Constant reaction on hair-trigger is often how you spiral into reactionary politics.
I’m going to err on the side of caution here and leave comments off for this post.