The Pentagon plans to livestream the firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. A Blaze headline under Glenn Beck’s name says it “must send a message to the Muslim world”. Mike Johnson and the military’s archbishop warn against the plan. The Blaze’s headline gives one man’s execution an audience of millions: “the Muslim world”. The man is Nidal Hasan. The crime in the story is his, and the headline addresses its punishment to a faith spread across many countries. That is the tell to keep: a group named where one person acted. It rides an old habit of the mind, where a stranger’s crime reads as his kind and our side’s acts read as circumstances. NPR’s October 9 headline names the actor and the act: the Pentagon, a livestream and a “shooter”. The device is “must send a message”, a cliché that sounds like a reason and ends the thinking: it never says what the message is or what should follow. The picture beside it does the opposite job. Glenn Beck sits at a microphone beside an illustration of five soldiers with rifles facing a lone prisoner, under a caption asking how far is too far. The picture asks; the headline has already answered, and its answer is an enemy far larger than one man. Every side keeps a frame. The Washington Post has Mike Johnson warn the video could be a ‘recruiting tool’ for terrorists: the viewers are still the enemy. CBC has the archbishop turn “terrorist practices” onto the state. A victim’s daughter, in Mediaite, calls the plan the ‘Worst Thing You Can Do’. At 9:00 AM ET the same day, The Blaze headlined that foreign money “is pouring” into ballot battles; its own count is 25 states with full or partial bans.
