The story of the Minneapolis mass shooting appeared below the fold on the New York Times website on Thursday, under the headline “Minneapolis’s Suspect’s Motive is a Mystery.” Nowhere on the Times homepage did “the suspect” get a pronoun. When you clicked through to the top story, it opened: “The person who the police say opened fire,” providing a tip-off that the paper’s ideologues knew there was a problem. Journalism is the business of specifics, and in the normal course o...
