A Washington Examiner opinion headline on October 21 calls Gov. Josh Shapiro “too cowardly” to denounce a race motive in the arrest report on the October 10 killing of Officer Shane Seiber. No hate-crime count is charged. Read the headline as a sentence and the gunman is not its subject. Gov. Josh Shapiro is, and the verb is a verdict, “too cowardly”, that gives his silence a motive no quote in the coverage shows. His first statement ordered flags to half-staff and praised officers; on October 20 he eulogized Seiber, words the column holds until its ninth paragraph. The killing, the one act charged, trails behind the word “alleged”. “Black man’s racism” is a verdict noun, a label that convicts before a court does. The claim has a source: an arrest report obtained by The Inquirer says Lewis told officers guarding him at Jefferson University Hospital that he shot them because they were white. The same report has him blaming them for touching him and coming onto his porch, and saying “They had guns”. The column’s first paragraph says he “allegedly revealed” race as “one of the reasons”. The headline drops both hedges. The tell: one reason among several becomes the name of the crime, and a man’s race becomes its author. It rides an old habit of the mind, where a stranger’s crime reads as his kind and one’s own side’s as circumstance. The charges District Attorney Larry Krasner listed include murder and homicide of a law enforcement officer, and no hate-crime or ethnic-intimidation count. Neither the Inquirer’s headline nor CBS’s names a race; the Inquirer’s text carries the claim.
