The behavior of mainstream journalists helps explain how the culture arrived in a place where Thompson’s murder could be celebrated.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the cruel, heartless response to the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO and we cover more media misses.
Leftist Callousness over UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Brutal Murder
Taylor Lorenz was, until very recently, taken seriously by the editors who run the nation’s most prestigious publications: the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic.
When Lorenz was hired as columnist by the Washington Post two years ago, top editors praised her “keen insights and boundless curiosity.”
“She treats her subjects and readers with a respect that has earned her the trust and admiration of a younger generation of news consumers,” the editors gushed in a statement announcing the hire.
Now that she’s left legacy media, Lorenz has shed the thin veneer of professionalism that separated her from the average enraged leftist social-media poster.
Lorenz, who previously cried on television about receiving death threats just for doing her job, joined the ugly parade of online progressives justifying — and in some cases, outright celebrating — the horrific murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
The headline for Lorenz’s Substack post says it all: “Why ‘we’ want insurance executives dead.”
Never one to simply stand behind her words, Lorenz had to complicate things with a vague gesture toward civility, while still implicitly defending the assassin.
“Let me be super clear: my post uses a collective ‘we’ and is explaining the public sentiment. It is not me personally saying ‘I want these executives dead and so we should kill them,'” Lorenz said on her User Magazine Substack, which she launched after leaving the Washington Post in October.
“I am explaining that thousands of Americans (myself included) are fed up with our barbaric healthcare system and the people at the top who rake in millions while inflicting pain, suffering, and death on millions of innocent people,” she added.
Lorenz goes on to suggest that for those who have “watched a loved one die because an insurance conglomerate has denied their life saving treatment as a cost cutting measure, yes, it’s natural to wish that the people who run such conglomerates would suffer the same fate.”
In the post, which included a meme of a smiling star and balloons that read, “CEO DOWN,” Lorenz said people “have very justified hatred toward insurance company CEOs because these executives are responsible for an unfathomable amount of death and suffering.”
She argued it is “good to call out this broken system and the people in power who enable it,” though she insisted that call out is “not so they can be murdered, but so that we can change the system and start holding people in power accountable for their actions.”
Law enforcement arrested 26-year-old Luigi Mangione on Monday morning in connection with Thompson’s murder. Mangione was spotted at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., by an individual who alerted police. Police reportedly found Mangione carrying a handwritten manifesto that criticized the health care industry for prioritizing profits, as well as a gun similar to the one used in Thompson’s murder, according to ABC News.
Lorenz acknowledged that some people online had taken their outrage too far and promoted violence.
And yet, she responded to the news that Blue Cross Blue Shield declared it would no longer pay for anesthesia for the full length of surgeries in several states by saying, “And people wonder why we want these executives dead.”
In a separate post, she responded to the news by sharing a screenshot of the name and photo of the insurer’s CEO.
Again, this is a person who was until very recently considered qualified to hold top staff jobs with the Times, the Post, and The Atlantic. Lorenz’s behavior goes a long way toward explaining how our culture arrived in a place where it’s considered broadly acceptable for so many people to celebrate a 50-year-old father’s cold blooded murder.
The reaction of many prominent figures at major corporate outlets and other elite institutions helps explain why Lorenz fit in — and rose through the ranks — at those respectable outlets while holding the ugly opinions she does.
Journalist Ken Klippenstein joked that he hoped Thompson’s ambulance ride “was in network.”
Columbia professor Anthony Zenkus said, “We mourn the death of 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.” The insensitive message is all the more troubling coming from the director of education for The Safe Center, which provides services for victims of family violence.
Meanwhile, New York magazine tells readers about “The Shooting That Was Inevitable. Our political system is breaking down. Now it has killed.”
And the hosts of The View were also just a little too receptive to the distasteful jokes being made online, with Sunny Hostin saying she was “shocked” by the anger the public is showing toward Thompson, who is a father and husband, but also suggesting it is “reflective about how people are feeling about their health care.”
“If you look at this particular CEO, while he made $10 million a year, which is not actually unusual for a company this size, this particular health company, United Healthcare, is the largest company responsible for Medicare programs for people over the age of 65,” Hostin added.
“And our country is one of the only countries that doesn’t have universal healthcare, and we don’t take care of our elderly and people are feeling the pinch. We talk about that all the time,” she said. “I think people are really angry at the healthcare system and, unfortunately, it’s translating to this father.”
Co-host Joy Behar, meanwhile, couldn’t miss an opportunity to make things political. “Don’t vote for Republicans,” she told viewers, “because they want to overthrow Obamacare.”
On Monday, as reporting came in indicating someone in a Pennsylvania McDonalds had tipped the police to the suspect’s whereabouts, freelance journalist Talia Jane said, “Pennsylvanians let our whole country down.”
You know things have veered off course when we’re agreeing with liberal journalist Aaron Rupar, who said it is “absolutely depraved to get your dunks in when the guy was just murdered in cold blood.”
Headline Fail of the Week
Esquire was forced to retract an entire column this week that asked, “Anybody Remember Neil Bush?”
“Nobody defines Poppy Bush’s presidency by his son’s struggles or the pardons he issued on his way out of the White House. The moral: Shut the f— up about Hunter Biden, please,” wrote liberal pundit Charles P. Pierce.
“[The] lucky American businessman[‘s] . . . father exercised his unlimited constitutional power of clemency to pardon the Lucky American Businessman for all that S&L business way back when. The president’s name was George H.W. Bush. The Lucky American Businessman was his son, Neil,” Pierce wrote.
The magazine’s fact-checkers overlooked one small detail: That pardon never happened.
The outlet has since deleted the entire column; the link leads to a page that says, “This Column is No Longer Available.” It includes an editor’s note that explains the column was “removed due to an error” and “Esquire regrets the mistake.”
Media Misses
• Speaking of pardons that never happened, The View co-host Ana Navarro had her own ChatGPT-driven flop when she wrongly claimed that “Woodrow Wilson pardoned his brother-in-law, Hunter deButts,” in trying to defend President Biden’s pardon for his son, Hunter. Social media users were quick to point out that Mr. “deButts” was not a real person.
She later wrote on X, “Hey Twitter sleuths, thanks for taking the time to provide context. Take it up with ChatGPT.”
• Los Angeles Times senior legal columnist Harry Litman announced his resignation from the outlet last week as he accused the paper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, of “appeasing” President-elect Donald Trump.
“I think they cowered and are worried about their personal holdings and just being threatened by Trump. And that’s a really shameful capitulation, I think. So, I just felt I couldn’t be a part of it and had to resign,” Litman said during a recent appearance on MSNBC. Litman and other staffers were outraged by Soon-Shiong’s decision to not endorse a candidate in the presidential race this year.
• White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre touted false polling numbers from a “U.S. Gov” survey in defense of Biden’s pardon for Hunter. She claimed the poll found “64 percent of the American people agree with the pardon.” Yet the poll, which was conducted by YouGov, not “U.S. Gov,” in fact found that 64 percent of Democrats support the pardon. When it comes to the entire American populace, just 34 percent “strongly” or “somewhat” approve of the pardon. Meanwhile, 50 percent of Americans “strongly” or “somewhat” disapproved.