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Erik Wemple

New York Daily News editor defends provocative cover: ‘We are stating the facts’

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December 3, 2015 at 6:52 p.m. EST

New York Daily News Editor in Chief Jim Rich knew that the front page of his tabloid (see above) on the San Bernardino massacre would bounce around today. “It’s always a hot-button issue,” said Rich of mass killings and gun control. And when you put the word “God” on the front page in that context, “you’d be naive if you didn’t think you were going to get a response.”

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Though the Daily News commonly reacts to mass shootings with treatments scolding official inaction on countermeasures, this particular presentation got wide play — and denunciation — on Fox News and other cable outlets, not to mention an untold mass of attention on social media. What surprised Rich was not so much the volume, but the breakdown. “I thought it was going to be 50-50,” an even distribution of positive and negative responses. “And it’s been 80-20 or 70-30” in favor of positive reactions, says the editor in chief.

Some of those negative reactions have ripped the Daily News for citing only Republicans who’ve responded to the carnage by emphasizing thoughts and prayers, while some Democrats have as well. “It wasn’t by accident,” says Rich. After listing off various Democrats who’d also extended thoughts-and-prayers, Rich said, “But the thing that they also offer is solutions or ideas for how to end this gun scourge, whereas the Republicans that we singled out offer nothing but these empty platitudes. ‘Oh, let’s go to the playbook, we’ve just had 14 people slaughtered, let’s go to thoughts-and-prayers,'” says Rich, summing up the alleged mentality.

“We’ve gone after this from just straight horror to outrage to blaming it on politicians to blaming it on the NRA to letting President Obama’s words speak for us and the nation, and there comes a point where…you say how else are you going to to do this in order to make a difference. That’s where we found ourselves last night when we saw all these tweets coming out?” says Rich.

Responding to critics who say the cover mocked religion and prayer, Rich earlier today released a statement: “The Daily News’ front page is not, in any way, shape or form, condemning prayer or religion. Anyone suggesting otherwise is — either intentionally or unintentionally — misconstruing the point, which is that most GOP politicians have offered nothing but empty platitudes and angry rhetoric in response to the ongoing plague of gun violence in our country.”

Whereas Rich runs the Daily News’s newsroom, Arthur Browne runs the editorial page. Today’s editorial on San Bernardino read, in part, “In San Bernardino, the killers wore masks and tactical gear and were armed to the teeth. This is the stuff of war, waged on Americans here at home. And members of Congress — let’s be blunt, Republicans in Congress — are surrendering. They are saluting the flag of the National Rifle Association.” That message, says Rich, nestled alongside the treatment that he and his colleagues put on the front page: “I think we were pointing out something that was obvious to many people and has been expressed elsewhere in the social media world and I think it dovetailed with our editorial today as well,” says Rich.

“We are stating the facts on this page one. Here is what these same people who have stonewalled gun control measures — here’s how they behave every time this happens. We present [the facts] loudly and straight to the point,” says Rich.

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