When Charlie Kirk was shot dead onstage at Utah Valley University, I waited for the headlines. Not because I doubted what I’d seen, but because I wanted to know whether the press still had the courage to call a thing by its name.
They didn’t.
“Conservative commentator killed at event.”
“Right-wing activist dies after shooting.”
“Gunman opens fire during speech.”
Killing. Shooting. Incident. Anything but assassination.
I believe in verbal precision. Words are scalpels; they cut truth from confusion. For a news organization to deliberately blunt its instruments in the face of something of this gravity felt not merely cowardly, but complicit. The moment they refused to use the word assassination, they took a side: against clarity, against moral accountability, and, by extension, against people like me, and likely you.
Because here’s what that hedging did: it told the public that this wasn’t quite political violence, not quite a pattern, not quite a warning. And the online Left responded accordingly, with laughter, cheers, and celebration. Some literally danced. It was obscene, but worse, it was emboldening. When the nation’s newsrooms refuse to name a political murder as what it plainly is, they aren’t calming tensions; they’re signaling permission. They are winking at the mob.
It felt, viscerally, as though a target had been placed on every outspoken conservative’s back. As though the message was: Be careful what you say; you could be next, and we’ll call it “an unfortunate incident.”
Perhaps that was an overreaction. But fear works that way, especially in a country this polarized. And that’s dangerous, and not just for the right. A threatened animal strikes first. The same reflex exists in nations as in people. When truth becomes negotiable, when violence is minimized for political comfort, the entire social body moves into fight-or-flight. It’s how civilizations bleed out.
What “Assassination” Actually Means
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, assassination is “the murder of an important or prominent person for political or religious reasons.” The verb, assassinate, means “to murder an important person in a surprise attack for political or religious reasons.”
By that definition, two things are necessary: the victim must be prominent, and the motive must be political or religious. The first is indisputable; Charlie Kirk was a national figure, founder of Turning Point USA, and one of the most influential conservative voices among young Americans. The second, motive, remains “under investigation.”
But let’s be honest: when a well-known political figure is targeted from a distance at a public event, that alone should meet the moral threshold of the term. When the target is symbolic, the act is symbolic. We understood that once.
Imagine a politically neutral influencer — someone popular with young audiences, controversial only for speaking too bluntly about the world — shot dead by a sniper while addressing a crowd. Would anyone hesitate to call that an assassination? Of course not. Reporters would use the word immediately and without fear. The only reason they hesitate now is that acknowledging the truth would mean admitting where the hatred came from.
Or consider Ronald Reagan’s shooting in 1981. John Hinckley Jr. was not politically motivated; he was obsessed with Jodie Foster. Yet every outlet called it an assassination attempt. The act itself, its form, its target, its implication, was enough. Facts mattered more than optics.
So what changed?
The Loss of the Press’s Moral Backbone
When reporters begin treating truth as something that needs prior authorization, the press stops being a witness and becomes a bureaucracy.
Once, the social contract of journalism was simple: observe, verify, describe plainly. Now it’s observe, verify, consult legal, weigh the optics, test the narrative, describe safely.
That shift may protect reputations, but it kills trust. It turns the press from profession into performance, an industry more concerned with managing perception than telling the truth.
The press has grown timid because the ecosystem around it punishes clarity. Every word is a tripwire; every honest label can be spun as bias. So even neutral editors sand down the edges, thinking the wisest route lies in caution, while activist editors openly court the left. But journalistic neutrality doesn’t mean refusing to name reality. It means telling the truth regardless of which side it favors.
When journalists become afraid to speak plainly, they stop informing the public and start soothing it. They fear not getting the facts wrong, but getting blamed for the implications of the facts. That’s not objectivity. That’s institutional cowardice.
And it’s eating away at the country’s moral spine.
Why This Evasion Is So Corrosive
This linguistic cowardice isn’t a small matter. It shapes how a nation perceives right and wrong.
When the press refuses to name political violence for what it is, they blur the moral lines that keep civilization standing. Readers learn to distrust their own senses. If it looks like an assassination but the paper calls it an “incident,” readers think that maybe they can’t tell truth from spin anymore. That confusion metastasizes into cynicism, and cynicism into despair.
Every euphemism rots trust a little more.
When words lose their moral weight, so does the society that uses them.
A Possible Renewal
Still, there are glimmers of hope. Bari Weiss’s rise from independent Substack publisher to the helm of CBS has caught national attention. Her Substack, The Free Press, earned credibility for clarity, courage, and the willingness to question sacred cows on both sides. While Weiss is ideologically middle left, she is well known to be a fair-minded person who values truth and accuracy over politics.
If anyone can help restore a newsroom culture that values truth over tribal safety, it’s fair-minded people like Weiss. She has built her reputation on refusing to let ideology dictate language or story slant. Her appointment signals that at least some parts of the media world may remember what journalism is for.
If CBS succeeds under her leadership, it could become a prototype—a newsroom that speaks plainly again, even when doing so invites fury.
What We Can Do
But the burden doesn’t rest on editors alone. It can't. News consumers, we who are the other end of the media conversation, can help turn the tide.
- Demand precision. When headlines use safe words like “incident,” ask why. Hold journalists to their own standards.
- Reward courage. Support outlets (like PJ Media and our sister sites) and writers who prize honesty over alignment.
- Don’t outsource discernment. Read widely; compare coverage; test the words yourself.
- Model clarity. In your own speech and writing, refuse euphemism and speak honestly. The language of truth hardens when used and decays when avoided.
- Remember that trust is mutual. A truthful press depends on a public that expects — and rewards — truth.
The refusal to call the killing of Charlie Kirk an assassination is more than a semantic quirk; it’s a symptom of a deeper moral decay. It reveals a press that has traded courage for calibration, meaning for messaging.
But there’s still time to turn back. Journalism can reclaim its calling. not as an arm of ideology, but as the conscience of a free people. And if mainstream journalism does not reclaim truth, there's a healthy and growing alternative media that is ready to take its place.
When reporters rediscover the courage to name things as they are, the public will rediscover the instinct to trust them. Until then, it falls to the rest of us to keep the words alive, to guard the clarity they abandoned, and to remind them what truth sounds like when it’s spoken without permission.
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this column referred to Bari Weiss as the new head of MSNBC/MSNOW. We apologize to our readers for this error.
