What kind of sick minds would make a joke out of mass murder?
Sicker still, it’s the editors and staff of the New York Times who made fun of mass murder, as seen in these two photos.
The first photo is an old photo of the Times’ staff “recreating” the 2001 Nepalese royal massacre, with longtime opinion editor Andrew Rosenthal wielding a toy M-16 and a bottle of wine over many staffers stained with fake blood. A wall calendar in the room indicates the mock massacre was staged in June 2001.
On June 1, 2o01, Nepal crown prince Dipendra went on a shooting spree with three guns, including an M-16, and killed 10 members of the royal family, including the king, queen, and himself.
The second photo shows then-foreign desk editor and future Times executive editor Bill Keller presiding over a fake mass-suicide scene, meant to invoke the 1997 mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult.
Gawker’s Adam Weinstein explains, June 23, 2015, that the source of the images is a former NYT staffer and current Bloomberg View editor Anne Cronin, who posted the images last weekend to a Facebook group for New York Times alumni.
At a minimum, these photos show the editors’ and journalists’ appalling lack of empathy.
Asked by email about his part in staging the photos, Keller responded: “This is what journalists did with their childish impulses before there was Gawker.”
“These photos are in poor taste, not reflective of the values of The New York Times and deeply regrettable,” Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. told Gawker in an emailed statement after being asked about them Tuesday morning.
H/t Clash Daily
~Éowyn
