Inside The Times’s Reporting and Judgment Calls on Charlie Kirk’s Assassination

At 2:23 p.m. Eastern time on Sept. 10, Charlie Kirk was shot at a college in Utah, and New York Times journalists began grappling with a series of questions and decisions. What happened? Were graphic videos of his injuries real? Which facts could we confirm without reporters on the scene yet?

At 3:01 p.m., we published confirmation of the shooting, and a new round of judgment calls began: Would we show clips of Kirk’s shooting? What words and shorthand would we use for him in headlines — a “right-wing provocateur,” a “conservative activist” or something else? What parts of his ideology — popular on the right, loathed on the left — would we include in coverage?

About 90 minutes later, the Times reporter Robert Draper confirmed Kirk’s death with his spokesperson, and our homepage changed to a banner headline with a new verb: “assassinated.”

Over the next six days, we published more than 100 pieces about Kirk. That’s a lot for someone many Americans did not know. But this was not only a story about one man being murdered, it was a story about political violence, a polarized society, free speech, the president and a cascade of consequences, from growing fury on the right to, most recently, the suspension of a late-night TV comedian for his comments about Kirk.