Getting word that four Black teenagers from the South Bronx had been gunned down by a white guy on the New York City subway was like Christmas come early for both the New York Daily News and its newly determined competitor, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. Both papers hurried to make the most of this dramatic event, no matter how little reporters actually knew about the identity of the gunman or his motives for shooting four people. Subway riders were one of their largest group of readers, and this was a story they would want to devour right away. Indeed, as veteran New York Post reporter Cynthia Fagen remembered, “If you went into the subway, everyone was reading a newspaper. It was either the Daily News or the New York Post.”
The Daily News provided the earliest and most dramatic coverage, with front-page headlines that blared “‘VICTIM’ ON SUBWAY SHOOTS 4,” and “A FANTASY COME TRUE: DEATH WISH GUNMAN CAPTURED CITY’S IMAGINATION,” and “PREY TURNS PREDATOR.” Not to be outdone, the Post was soon dubbing the shooter the “Bronson Copycat” and the “Death Wish Gunman” in equally salacious bannered articles. Within days, the Post even created a logo to accompany all of the articles on the shooting: a hand holding a gun, against the backdrop of a dark subway tunnel, with the text “Death Wish Vigilante.” Over the next few months, these two tabloids would produce an immense volume of increasingly inflammatory reports on this shooting.
What perhaps mattered more than the incendiary headlines or the sheer number of stories both tabloids immediately devoted to this event, however, was the misinformation each was also imparting to the public. The very first piece published by the Daily News, for example, claimed that the “men” who had been shot, including “Troy Canty, [age] 25,” were all “armed with screwdrivers.” Another piece doubled down on its reporting that the teens had been armed, noting that they had actually been “carrying sharpened screwdrivers.” Such coverage also showered the shooter with praise. As yet another Daily News article insisted admiringly, the gunman was, for New York, “an instant hero, a true-life Charles Bronson, a subway vigilante with his own style of justice.”
The Post‘s stories similarly revered the shooter, noting that his “courteous and unrattled style was dramatically similar to that of the character played by [Charles] Bronson.” He had, after all, taken the time “to help the hysterical women to their feet and escorted them to another car before fleeing.” Meanwhile, the Post also noted repeatedly, these young men had “extensive criminal records,” and at least one of them, the main offender, Troy Canty, was “twenty-three” and thus was hardly a youngster who was merely horsing around with his friends on the 2 train.