On October 11, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said on Fox News that Gov. Kathy Hochul was silent on the October 2 stabbing of an off-duty NYPD detective while condemning an October 8 ICE shooting in the Bronx. Her office accused him of politicizing it. The two hottest words in the Post headline sit outside any quotation marks. ‘Illegals’ appears nowhere on the page but the headline. ‘Grandstanding’ appears only in the Post’s own sentences. Mullin’s words on the page are ‘hypocrisy,’ ‘career sanctuary politicians’ and ‘criminals.’ The sentence is built as his charge, so the reader hears a cabinet secretary when the outlet is speaking. The tell: in a sentence about what someone said, a loaded word with no quotation marks around it is the writer’s word. ‘Illegals’ covers two people. ICE named them as Dangelo Rafael Jean Caraballo and Sneider Mejia Bautista, now charged with attempted murder after police said they stabbed Det. Jose Mercedes seven times in an October 2 robbery attempt. DHS called them ‘illegal aliens’ on October 6, before their arrest. CBS wrote the status as DHS’s claim. Fox made them a ‘duo’ who ‘allegedly’ stabbed. The Post keeps neither the count nor the hedge: two named men become a category. Set against the shooting, the word does a second job. CNN’s headline has a doer: ‘ICE agents shot at man in car with his 5-year-old son.’ The Post’s has none; the shooting is something Hochul grandstands ‘over’, and the child arrives in its 11th paragraph. Mullin’s ‘All three of these criminals’ folds Oscar Belgal in with the stabbing suspects. Federal agents fired, and the headline asks a governor to answer for two other men. Her office answers in kind, with ‘rogue ICE agents.’
