For the New York Times, the real story isn’t that police have charged an alleged illegal immigrant with the disappearance and death of 20-year-old Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts. The story is that President Trump is citing her murder in pursuit of his immigration agenda.
For a significant number of national newsrooms, the real scandal is almost never the violent tragedy that could reflect poorly on Democratic lawmakers and policies. The real scandal is how the GOP and conservatives “seize on” (i.e. exploit) these stories for their own benefit.
The Times published an article Tuesday that currently bears the headline, “Immigrant Is Charged in Mollie Tibbetts Murder in Iowa, and Trump Seizes on Case.” In a sign of some discomfort about the story, the report’s headline has undergone multiple amendments, including the removal of the word “undocumented.”
The story’s opening paragraphs currently read:
Tibbetts’ remains were found early Tuesday morning, according to law enforcement officials. Police have charged Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 24, as the chief suspect in her disappearance and murder. Authorities claimed initially that Rivera has been living in the U.S. illegally for four to seven years. There has since arisen some dispute over his exact status. Rivera has been charged with first-degree murder. His bail was set Tuesday at $1 million.
The Times’ “seize” report is not the first instance of the Tibbetts murder appearing on the paper’s website. It is, however, the first example of original coverage that the Times has given to her murder. Prior to the publication of the “seize” article, the Times ran a wire story about Tibbetts’ death.
The paper can claim with a straight face that its “Trumps seizes” report isn’t the first Tibbetts-related content to appear on its website. It cannot, however, lean honestly on the AP’s separate work to defend itself from the accurate criticism that Times reporters didn’t address her murder until the story could made into something about “GOP overreach.”
As I’ve explained before, my gripe with the “GOP pounce” trope isn’t that newsrooms are writing reaction pieces. It’s that the “overreach” stories are almost always the first time that major news events are mentioned at all by certain newsrooms, especially when Republicans are the ones doing the seizing. You see evidence of that here, here, and this week with Times’ coverage of Tibbetts’ murder, among so many other examples.
