Oy gevalt!
Outdated headline sparks vicious online hate campaign directed at Las Vegas newspaper
Associated Press (
archive.ph)
By David Bauder
2023-09-21 15:04:23GMT
NEW YORK (AP) — A Las Vegas newspaper is being viciously attacked online for its coverage of an
alleged murder of a retired police chief, either because of a misunderstanding or a deliberate attempt to mislead.
The “firehose of hatred” has led the Las Vegas Review-Journal to sift through email directed at one of its reporters to protect her from the worst of it, the paper’s executive editor, Glenn Cook, said on Wednesday.
On Aug. 18, four days after a 64-year-old former California police chief, Andreas Probst, was killed when he was struck by a hit-and-run motorist while riding his bike in Las Vegas, Review-Journal reporter Sabrina Schnur
interviewed his family for a story.
The headline: “Retired police chief killed in bike crash remembered for laugh, love of coffee.”
Then the story took a sinister turn.
Video emerged, apparently taken by a teenage passenger in the car that hit Probst, showing that it was no accident. Charges against the 17-year-old driver were upgraded to murder on Aug. 29, and judges ruled on Wednesday that the two juveniles
will be tried as adults.
The video, described by Cook as a “snuff film,” began circulating online and the Review-Journal linked to an edited version of it last Saturday.
That’s when the attacks against the newspaper began. Someone created a social media post about the case, showing the headline from Schnur’s Aug. 18 article and suggesting the Review-Journal had covered up the murder of a retired law enforcement official.
Cook said he couldn’t speak to the motivations of whoever posted the insinuations, whether or not they knew the original story was published before the video surfaced.
“What I can say definitively is the internet mob took no effort to fact-check,” he said. “The internet mob was happy to spread the message, spread it and add their own animosity to the stew.”
The rush of online hate increased exponentially early Sunday when Elon Musk, owner of the former Twitter site now known as X, sent a message to his 157 million followers: “An innocent man was murdered in cold blood while riding his bicycle. The killers joke about it on social media. Yet, where is the media outrage? Now you begin to understand the lie.”
A spokesperson for Musk did not immediately return a message seeking comment on Wednesday.
Some of the attacks were lewd and antisemitic, wishing harm on the journalists. One specific threat was referred to authorities, Cook said.
It’s a particularly sensitive topic at the Review-Journal, where a year ago its investigative reporter, Jeff German, was
stabbed to death. One of the people German wrote about, Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles, had attacked the reporter on social media and was later charged in the case and is awaiting trial.
At one point last weekend, to try and stop the flow of hate, Review-Journal editors changed the headline of the Aug. 18 article in its internet archive, replacing “bike crash” with “hit-and-run.”
That in itself opens up a can of worms: Should a news organization go back in history to change a story based on information that comes out after it was originally published? Cook said he reasoned that replacing “bike crash” with “hit-and-run” was not changing anything factually.
Unfortunately, he said, “that fed the trolls even more.”
Schnur declined comment on Wednesday — she was writing the story about the day’s court proceedings — but
told the Poynter journalism website a day earlier that she began to feel unsafe when people online began unearthing social media posts she made as a teenager. She has briefly moved out of her apartment, and Cook said the newspaper has taken steps to protect her.
Schnur also said she worried about those around her, saying that when talking with her mother on Sunday, she overheard her telling her father in a hushed voice that someone was at the door.
“I could hear the fear in her voice,” she told Poynter. “There was no one there, but just for a moment, my heart broke. ... Because of work that I did and people potentially trying to find where I live, my mom has to be scared of her front door.”
Online harassment of journalists, particularly women and minorities, is an ongoing problem that hasn’t abated, said Jeje Mohamed, senior manager for digital safety and free expression at PEN America. In a 2020 global study, 73% of women journalists said they had
experienced online abuse.
Perhaps because of their experiences, editors at the Las Vegas Review-Journal are better than those at many organizations in responding to protect its journalists, she said.
Recently, harassment campaigns often expand to where journalism and news organizations themselves are the subject of attack, Mohamed said.
“This was a manufactured campaign to undermine trust in the media,” Cook said. “There’s just this increasing mass of people out there who are so angry about a lot of things, but in particular carry anger at the media, who saw this as an opportunity.”
In a column
published on Tuesday, Cook publicly defended Schnur and touted her work. He said she was the first local reporter to talk to Probst’s family to tell their story, and that when a source contacted her to tell her about the then-unknown video, she instructed the person how to send it to police. Authorities already had it at that point.
“I was concerned with making sure that people understood that she was a person,” Cook told The Associated Press, “that she was not the villain they made her out to be.”
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A reporter made sure a retired police chief’s death didn’t go uncovered. Then social media attacked her.
Poynter Institute (
archive.ph)
By Angela Fu
2023-09-20 11:44:46GMT
When retired police chief Andreas Probst was killed in a hit-and-run last month, Las Vegas Review-Journal crime reporter Sabrina Schnur was the first journalist to arrive on the scene.
Schnur was also the first local reporter to talk to Probst’s family, penning an
obituary to ensure that his widow’s and daughter’s voices would be heard.
And she was the reporter who instructed a source with video footage of the killing to go to the police, just nine hours before police announced a murder charge in the case.
But despite her work documenting Probst’s death, Schnur became the target of anti-Semitic attacks and death wishes over the weekend as social media users questioned why the “media” wasn’t properly covering the attack. Screenshots of the month-old obituary’s headline sparked outrage among readers who falsely assumed the Review-Journal was downplaying Probst’s death.
The obituary originally ran on Aug. 18 with the headline “Retired police chief killed in bike crash remembered for laugh, love of coffee.” At that point, police did not yet know that the killing was intentional. Thirteen days later, on Aug. 31, a source approached Schnur with a video showing the driver in the crash intentionally hitting Probst and laughing about it with the passenger. She connected the source with the police, and the Review-Journal
covered the subsequent murder charge.
But when that video went viral over the weekend, social media users shared screenshots of the old obituary, taking issue with the phrase “bike crash.” They filled Schnur’s inbox and social media mentions with increasingly personal attacks and accused her of being anti-white. They shared her photo and made anti-Semitic comments. They circulated her office phone number and told her that they hoped she would get cancer, that they hoped she would die. They found her private social media accounts and dug through her Twitter, unearthing posts she’d made as a teenager, going as far back as 2015.
“That’s what started to scare me — if they’re taking the time to go through my Twitter, what else are they taking the time to find on me?” Schnur said. “I started to piece together, OK, if I was going to just cyber stalk someone, what things would they be able to find on me? I started to feel genuinely unsafe at that point.”
On Sunday morning, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, amplified one of the screenshots,
posting “An innocent man was murdered in cold blood while riding his bicycle. The killers joked about it on social media Yet, where is the media outrage? Now you begin to understand the lie.” That post had 68.2 million views as of Monday evening.
A request for comment sent to X generated an automated email response.
The Review-Journal’s social media accounts and other staff also received vicious attacks. When Schnur shared that she’d received 700 notifications on X and an onslaught of angry emails and voicemails, editors jumped in to support her and make sure she was safe.
Executive editor Glenn Cook said that during his 30-plus years in journalism, he’d never seen vitriol of this volume or intensity. “It’s like a fire hose of hatred to the face,” he wrote in a
column about the social media outrage.
In an attempt to slow the harassment, editors changed the Aug. 18 obituary’s headline — which Schnur did not write — so that it read “hit-and-run” instead of “bike crash.” The Review-Journal then published a
story about the online harassment in an attempt to correct the record. Cook told staff scheduled to work on Sunday not to come into the office as a safety precaution.
“We know firsthand that social media vitriol can turn into something worse,” Cook said. “That’s one of the takeaways from what we dealt with with
Jeff German’s murder.”
German was an investigative reporter for the Review-Journal who was found stabbed to death outside his home a year ago. Police later arrested former Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles, who had been the subject of German’s reporting. Before German’s death, Telles had made angry social media posts referencing the journalist and his work.
Sept. 2 marked the one-year anniversary of German’s death, which Cook said is still fresh on his staff’s minds. On social media, users resurfaced
posts about the anniversary and mocked his death.
“We watch this a lot more carefully than I think other news organizations might, and we’re sensitive to it,” Cook said. “If someone is trolling (our staff) in an especially nasty way, we want to know about it. We want to know because of what we went through with Jeff. The days of us blowing off social media vitriol as trolls being trolls — those ended for us last year. We’re never going back to that space.”
Cook said that the paper has already contacted the police about one death threat stemming from the weekend barrage of harassment. At Schnur’s request, the paper also went through her email and voicemail so that she wouldn’t have to read or hear the hateful messages.
Sunday “felt like a funeral,” Schnur said. She spent much of the day crying and trying not to take the messages to heart. Then she hosted an endless parade of people bringing her food and offering to sit with her. And then, at the end of the day, she packed up her belongings and moved out of her apartment. She had to leave anyway because her air conditioning was broken, but due to the harassment, she plans on staying away for a few more days. She’s not sure when she’ll feel comfortable going back.
Schnur has also watched the harassment campaign go after the people close to her. On X, Schnur regularly shares her colleagues’ and friends’ work, and their mentions have now been flooded with hateful comments.
She worries for her parents and has urged them to take precautions like avoiding their front yard and not leaving the garage open. She reminded them that German was found lying next to his house, a place he had presumably felt safe.
While on a phone call with her mom Sunday, Schnur overheard her mom telling her dad in a hushed voice that there was someone at the door.
“I could hear the fear in her voice,” Schnur said. “There was no one there, but just for a moment, my heart broke. … Because of work that I did and people potentially trying to find where I live, my mom has to be scared of her front door.”
Schnur’s editors offered to let her take time off, but she was back at work Monday morning at 6 a.m. She had an interview scheduled with the mother of a 24-year-old man who was shot Sept. 10. The mother told Schnur that because her son was a Black man with tattoos, she felt like people were shunning her story and making false assumptions about her son.
The last thing Schnur wanted to do was not call the woman and give her the impression that she also didn’t care: “It’s a
story I’m passionate about. No one else was covering it, and I think it matters.”
One of Schnur’s top priorities as a crime reporter is making sure every homicide victim has “a name and a face and a family and a story.” She plans to continue covering Probst’s homicide. The driver suspected of killing him is a minor, and Schnur is the only reporter in the area who regularly covers juvenile court.
“I’ve put in 110% on this case because the family has asked for it, because the family has been brave enough to come forward, because it’s a ruthless case — but also because it’s a case on my beat,” Schnur said. “I’m not going to put my life on hold because I’m upset or, frankly, that I’m scared. I can go somewhere where I’m a little bit less scared and keep up with the stories that I care about.
“I’m not going to stop writing because some people on Twitter are upset.”
