The Daily - The Headlines: May 24

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

Our new show brings you the biggest stories in about 10 minutes. It's the complement to The Daily you’ve been waiting for. This episode includes: A Year After a School Shooting, Divisions Run Through Uvalde, with our National reporter Edgar SandovalUnder the Radar, Right-Wing Push to Tighten Voting Laws Persists, with our national politics correspondent Nick CorasanitiSurgeon General Warns That Social Media May Harm Children and Adolescents, with our Well reporter Catherine PearsWe'll be sharing The Headlines every day this week, right here in your Daily feed. To get the full experience, download New York Times Audio, a new app that's home to all our audio journalism, including exclusive new shows. Free for Times news subscribers. Download it at nytimes.com/audioapp. 

Hey, it's Michael. Every day this week, we're bringing you something extra, a new show called The Headlines. It's a short show with three top stories that go beyond what we're covering on The Daily. In fact, the shows are designed to go together. So try it out. And after this week, you can only get The Headlines

in our new app, New York Times Audio, where you can find the shows you already know and love, like The Daily, This American Life, Serial, The Run-Up, and discover a bunch of new shows that you can't get anywhere else, like The Headlines. You can find the app at nytimes.com slash audio app, or search for NYT Audio in the App Store. Okay, here's The Headlines. audio in the App Store. Okay, here's the headlines. It's been a year since the tragedy in Ubaldi, and parents and the family members of the 21 victims still don't know really what happened, how many children could have survived if the police went in sooner. The Surgeon General has issued a public advisory warning about the potential risks of

social media to young people's mental health. What we're seeing is efforts to change voting for the long haul, for things that will continue to impact elections for years to come. From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Annie Correal. Today's Wednesday, May 24th. Here's what we're covering. My name is Edgar Sandoval. I'm a reporter with the New York Times based in San Antonio, Texas.

On May 24, 2022, I was driving to Ubaldi after hearing about the school shooting there. As I got closer, we started learning more revelations that the shooting was really catastrophic. It was the second worst mass shooting in U.S. history in a school. There were 19 children dead and two teachers. In the last year, I've been standing in touch with the families of this horrible tragedy. And parents and the family members of the 21 victims still don't know really what happened. The families have been going to city hall meetings, school board meetings, demanding answers. And at times, the meetings have been pretty contentious. At a school board meeting earlier this month, there was an uncle of one of the victims,

Jesse Rizzo, and his frustration really echoes what many people are saying in Ubalde, especially the parents of the children. He told the school board the family members still don't know what happened inside. They know that the police waited for more than an hour to breach the classrooms and confront the gunman. But they don't know how many kids could have been saved if the police went in sooner. The school administrators really haven't responded to the family's concerns. They pretty much just sat in the school board meetings and try to explain that there are several investigations that are ongoing, and therefore they cannot give them any answers, which obviously frustrates the families even more. There are three concurring investigations being conducted in Ubaldi.

The most prominent one, and the one that people are really looking to to is the one by the Ubaldi County District Attorney. She will look into if any of the officers should be charged for the low police response. There's an investigation by the Department of Justice into similar matters. And also the city of Ubaldi has hired an investigator and is working closely with the district attorney. And all the investigators said that's just a time-consuming process. I was in Ubaldi just a few days ago. And when you arrive to Ubaldi, I mean, you can't escape the history of the tragedy. There are murals of the victims downtown.

There's 21 crosses at a plaza at the center of town. When you talk to people, you start to realize that tensions kind of go beyond the school board meetings. Some people are asking in hushed tones if the memorial should go away. They want to put the tragedy behind them. There's also incidents where people approach city officials quietly and whisper, you know, when is it time for us to clean the memorials and kind of go back to our old identity? And the families, of course, they want to keep those memorials and murals there forever. Victims' families plan to hold

a candlelight vigil this evening in Uvalde. Here's what else we're covering. The U.S. Surgeon General issued an urgent warning Tuesday about the dangers of social media. In a 19-page report, Dr. Vivek Murthy said social media presents a profound risk of harm for children and teens. He said the country is in the midst of a youth mental health crisis, and he's concerned social media could be an important driver of that crisis. When I spoke to the Surgeon General, he really emphasized that adolescents are not mini-adults and that their brains are going through this really unique period of development

that means that they are especially susceptible to some of the risks of social media. Katherine Pearson is a reporter on The Well Desk at The Times. She says recent data shows that 95% of teens are using social media, with more than a third of them saying they use it almost constantly. So what they have found in research is that using social media frequently can really affect how the brain is developing so that parts of the brain that are really important for emotional learning and behavior and impulse control and moderating social behavior are particularly sensitive to this highly stimulating world

of social rewards and punishments. One thing to keep in mind is the data are not totally straightforward and the effects of social media can definitely be positive and negative. So social media allows teens to connect with others and to express themselves and find community, which is why the report really calls for ongoing research into both the potential benefits and the potential harms. benefits and the potential harms. So the Surgeon General also recommended that policymakers and tech companies and parents and families all work together to address some of these risks. So that would be, you know, making sure that they put safety measures in place to keep kids safe online, to actually enforce age minimums, for example. It would mean companies being really mindful of developing

social media platforms that aren't, you know, promoting endless scrolling or the like button or things that can be really developmentally tricky for tweens and teens. And in my conversation with him, he also really emphasized that the burden has fallen disproportionately on families to sort of navigate this on their own and that that should not be the case anymore. And finally. My name is Nick Korsniti, and I'm a political reporter here at The New York Times. Recently, we've been looking at the continued effort of Republican lawmakers to enact new restrictive voting laws across the country. Republicans have long said and justified any electoral reforms as falling under the banner

of election integrity and making it, quote unquote, easier to vote, harder to cheat. But there is a network of billionaire-backed advocacy groups that have started to come together on weekly calls and have formed a new hub of election advocacy within the Republican Party. And privately, some members of the coalition have been a little bit more candid about exactly what's motivating them to change these laws. So we sifted through hundreds of pages of transcripts, listened to recordings of these calls, dug through meeting notes, and got an insight into how this new network of activist groups are looking to shape election law in the United States. And what we're seeing is efforts to change voting for the long haul, for things that will continue to impact elections for years to come.

Some of the priorities that have been listed by this group include ending same-day voter registration or shortening early voting periods. We obtained a recording of a recent conference call with activists in Michigan, where Cleta Mitchell, who is an attorney who has worked in the 2020 election to help President Trump try and overturn the results, she told the group, quote, I think you have to figure out what we have to do, where to fix the system that gives a Republican candidate a potential chance to win. So it's becoming increasingly clear that the Republican-led push to add new restrictive laws and change America's voting systems is going to persist. And as numerous nonpartisan election

groups have told us, these election laws are going to be law in time for next year's presidential election, and they're going to change how our elections are run. As part of this investigation, the Times reached out to Cleta Mitchell. She declined to comment. Those are the headlines. I'm Annie Correal. We'll be back tomorrow.