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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

You’re trying too hard to make that conspiratorial take: most responsible outlets don’t speculate on motives until there’s some evidence of a connection. For example, the stories I’ve read quoted his neighbors wondering whether there’s a connection to what happened at Brown, which is just an hour away and still has the killer at large. If there’s any evidence of an anti-Jewish motive, I will be shocked if it’s not an NYT headline within minutes.

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> most responsible outlets don’t speculate on motives until there’s some evidence of a connection

That is simply not true, every single news outlet without fail speculates, uncritically quotes a speculator, or leaves out warranted critical speculation at their own discretion. Pick a news site that you think doesn’t do this and I will happily find an example from their front page.

Reporters tend to be very careful about this in the context of things like deaths, embarrassing scandals, etc. where they might be sued. If you note, the kind of stories you’re referring to tend to be referencing what someone else said—a source in law enforcement, neighbors, friends, etc.—because that makes it clear that there are not the opinion of the news organization itself.

I agree with everything you said, but the news organization's decision to include or not include a quote or speculation from someone is fundamentally a narrative choice. And every news organization makes those choices at their own discretion and it can result in uncritical reporting.

Pick a few frontpage stories from any news site you like, then see how its covered one a new source you don't like/leans the opposite way politically (short of the crazy outlets) and see how the same stories are reported. You'll see different quotes, different speculation, different choices of what to include or not include. Hell even the choice of what is covered on the frontpage will obviously vary if you just compare them. Saying that what a news outlet is reporting is "not the opinion of the news organization itself" may be technically correct in a legal sense, but that's worst kind of correct.

Yes, coverage follows trends for most news organizations but that’s pretty far off of my original point which was that the reason the responsible news organizations weren’t covering this as an anti-Jewish hate crime was just there was no evidence supporting that theory. Now that details have started to come out, we have a good example of why serious journalists have that policy.

The title of this article leads with "Jewish, Pro-Israel MIT Professor..." so I think they've already decided to go with the "victim of antisemitism" default until proven otherwise.

Certainly it's more conspiratorial to assume that his death had something to do with his research, or that he was secretly a some kind of Walter White character?

Being politically outspoken on an issue which is contentious in that area, and which has caused violence before seems like the most plausible explanation that I have heard so far.

No, it’s just sticking to the publicly known information. Not listing something isn’t saying it’s not a factor, it’s just literally going with what the police were saying: they didn’t have any information about the motive yet.

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