Rich and Co., on today’s edition of The Editors, discuss the brutal assassination of a health-insurance CEO, and the abysmal responses to it from some in the media.

“I don’t know how to condemn this in sufficiently strong terms,” Charlie says. “It feels grotesque to me to even enter into discussions of the detail. What happened here was a man, a human being, was murdered in cold blood on the street. Once you get to why, you’re starting to negotiate with it. And I don’t want to negotiate with that.”

Dominic gets straight to the point, saying, “It should be repulsive to us. It should be something that naturally makes us go, ‘Yuck, that’s terrible.’ And that’s not the reaction that we’ve been seeing from a lot of people.”

Michael talks about human nature and says these horrible responses are “an ugly thing. I think it’s unfortunately a natural thing. This is a person that no one knows, right? That no one knew of this person before, and they have no humanizing connection to him, right? You wouldn’t get this reaction for any rich guy, right? Like if George Clooney was assassinated tomorrow in Manhattan the same way, it would just be a pure outpouring of grief because people have this human connection to him. And this guy, a health-care CEO, is just totally anonymous.

“It’s a really ugly sentiment, and it certainly made me wonder if we’re headed for one of these decades of violence — political violence aimed at people who aren’t necessarily even primarily political figures.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.