Twitter users berated the New York Times on Tuesday for choosing to focus on Michigan State’s sex scandals in a piece about the university’s recent school shooting.
New York Times reporter Tiffany May published an article using the horrific school shooting at Michigan State University – which left three students dead and five more wounded – as a pivot point to talk more about the school’s previous high-profile sex scandals.
Titled, "The mass shooting places Michigan State back in an uncomfortable national spotlight," May’s entry reported that the shooting "put the school back in the national spotlight, years after a sex abuse scandal involving a prominent sports medicine doctor on its faculty became public."
The article devoted the subsequent 398 words to reminding readers of the infamous scandal involving university physician Larry Nassar being accused of assaulting "girls and young women under the guise of medical treatment."
May wrote about the accusations, Nassar being sentenced to "40 to 125 years in prison for sex crimes" and described how university staff resigned over criticism with how they handled the Nassar scandal.
She claimed, "the university was unable to shake the legacy of the scandal," and added that the school "continued to make changes at the top as missteps by officials continued."
May returned to the topic of the shooting only at the very end of her article. She quoted the university’s interim president Teresa Woodruff, who weighed in on the shooting, saying, "This is a day of shock and heartbreak, here across our campus and our region. It’s something that is quite unimaginable but has been imagined at other places and at other times. But we just cannot imagine that it is here."
Twitter users blasted the Times for publishing such a perplexing and "tone-deaf" article in reference to the shooting.
Barstool Sports president Dave Portnoy eviscerated the outlet for the piece, tweeting, "Is the @nytimes serious with this headline? Biggest scumbags ever."
Journalist Ty Schalter claimed, "The inexplicably tone-deaf article places @nytimes back in an uncomfortable national spotlight."
Local Chicago journalist Eli Ong slammed the outlet and trashed conservative outlet "The Daily Wire" in the process, tweeting, "Interesting framing @nytimes. Painting the university as a villain that could have apparently stopped a random, unaffiliated man from going on a violent rampage because of how another administration handled Nassar. Real low-hanging, Daily Wire type stuff here."
NFL player Taybor Pepper admonished the piece's author, tweeting, "This is disgusting @nytmay. You should be ashamed of this so-called ‘reporting.’ I hope @nytimes reprimands you for this."
Twitch platform content creator @JayViperTV wrote, "Wow, to bring that up and link this tragedy to that? It's disgusting. Obviously a writer with an axe to grind."
Twitter account "TheDanimal" shared a screenshot of the offending article to Twitter, and captioned it, stating, "A journalist and editor at the @nytimes wrote and reviewed this article, then thought it was a good idea to publish. That is insane."
"Ann Arbor News" reporter Sam Dodge remarked on the article as well, tweeting, "I try not to comment on the work of other journalists (we all make mistakes), but this is so unbelievably tone-deaf that it needs to be called out.Stuff like this is why I always pushed back when my J-School professors insisted I refer to the @nytimes as the industry standard."
