A man named Robert Dorgan walked into an arena in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, on Monday night during a high school ice hockey game and opened fire. He killed two family members, shot three others, and then turned the gun on himself. The victims were his own relatives. Authorities believe the massacre was driven by a family dispute.
Within hours, Chief Goncalves held a news conference and disclosed the shooter's identity. Dorgan was born in 1969. He also went by the name Roberta Esposito. The chief did not elaborate on the name change, but the context filled itself in: Dorgan had reported a new gender to North Providence police back in 2020.
The New York Times covered the story. Nearly 800 words. Five reporters on the byline. And not a single mention that the shooter was identified as transgender.
According to Breitbart, this is not a case of an outlet exercising editorial brevity. Five reporters contributed to a piece that ran close to 800 words. That is a significant investment in a story. The Times had the space, the staff, and the sourcing to include the fact that Dorgan had changed his reported gender and adopted a female name. They chose not to.
The chief of police disclosed it in a public news conference. The Telegraph reported it. It was part of the official record. The Times simply decided its readers didn't need to know.
This is what a lie of omission looks like in practice. You don't have to fabricate a single word. You just leave out the ones that complicate your preferred narrative. The result is the same: a readership that walks away less informed than when they sat down.
Every major newsroom in America has made a series of choices over the past several years about how to handle transgender identity in crime reporting. Those choices reveal a clear hierarchy of values. When a transgender person is the victim of violence, their identity is central to the story. It appears in the headline, shapes the framing, and drives the narrative toward systemic oppression and hate crime designations. The identity isn't just mentioned; it becomes the story.
When a transgender person is the perpetrator, the identity vanishes. It becomes irrelevant, a private medical matter, something that responsible journalists supposedly don't need to disclose. The standard flips entirely depending on which direction the story cuts.
You cannot claim identity is essential context in one scenario and irrelevant in the other. That is not journalism. That is activism with a press badge.
The available facts paint a grim but straightforward picture:
Authorities believe this was a family dispute. Nothing in the available record suggests ideology or politics drove the shooting. This appears to be a man whose family had fractured, who had a documented history of conflict with relatives, and who chose to resolve it with horrific violence at a children's sporting event.
That is a tragedy. Families were shattered on a Monday night in Rhode Island, at an event where parents and kids should have been arguing about ice time and power plays. Nothing about the broader media debate changes that reality.
The instinct to suppress inconvenient facts doesn't protect vulnerable communities. It corrodes the one thing a newspaper actually sells: trust. When readers discover the omission, and they always do now, the concealment becomes a bigger story than the detail itself would have been.
If the Times had simply reported Dorgan's identity as part of the factual record, it would have been one detail among many. Instead, the decision to scrub it transforms a local crime story into another data point in the public's growing conviction that major outlets shape narratives rather than report them.
Five reporters. Eight hundred words. And the most publicly available, officially disclosed detail about the shooter didn't make the cut. The editors knew. They just decided you shouldn't.
That silence tells you more about the New York Times than any story they actually print.