Editors at The New York Times staged scenes from two mass killings and took photos of them, according to a Gawker report.
Gawker got ahold of the photos, which show staff members at the paper purportedly joking about mass killings.
One image, from June 2001, was taken in the same month that Nepal crown prince Dipendra shot and killed 10 members of the royal family before killing himself. He used an M16, and in the Times photo, the "shooter," opinion editor Andrew Rosenthal, is holding what appears to be a fake M16 and a bottle of wine. People in the room with him are stained with fake blood and sprawled on a conference table.
The other photo was taken in 1997, and reportedly mimics the mass suicide of members of the Heaven's Gate cult. Bill Keller, the foreign desk editor at the time, is standing over the "victims." Keller later became the executive editor of the paper.
"These photos are in poor taste, not reflective of the values of The New York Times and deeply regrettable," the paper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., told Gawker in response to the photos.
The photos, according to Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha, "were taken as part of the foreign desk's annual tradition of seersucker day almost two decades ago."
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Fusion report, meanwhile, claims the Times was tricked into thinking Dylann Roof — the alleged shooter in the Charleston, S.C., church killings last week — wrote about the children's TV show "My Little Pony." A British teen admitted to making up the details and sending them to a Times reporter, who included them in a story about the shooting.
The Times pulled the details after it was revealed they were fake. The reporter, Frances Robles, responded on Twitter:
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