I write again on the occasion of another sad mass shooting in
America. The nature of the shooting, an attack that killed a
score of children and half a
dozen others at a school in Connecticut, is simply horrific;
any comprehension of it eludes the healthy mind.
Conspiracy theorists are already busy on the job weaving
imaginary connections and, not twenty-four hours in, had begun
forcing the facts into standard
pre-existing narratives for mass-shootings. The most popular
so far seem to be that the shooter was brainwashed, that there
were actually multiple
shooters, and that the whole event was planned as a pretext
for a government gun-grab.
Again.
We have been flooded with a constant barrage of information
about this tragedy since it began to unfold, and not all of
that information has been true.
Some has been spectacularly far from the mark. In order to
formulate a thoughtful response to the horrors inflicted upon
us by the shooter, no matter his
intention or disposition, we need to be able to understand how
information comes to us and understand that we can anticipate
that it will change.
This will perhaps be a basic primer for many readers of the
CSI website, and I may be restating something that skeptics do
instinctively, but it’s worth
repeating. New media, especially YouTube, has changed the
public’s relationship to news and information in a way
that has made conspiracy theories not only
more prevalent but also a much more participatory pursuit. For
this reason, it is vital that any student of conspiracy theory
attain some degree of media
literacy. A good place to start is with the information cycle.
The “information cycle” is a concept that comes
out of media studies and posits that newsworthy information
passes through a fairly consistent sequence of
media outlets as it makes its way into the history books.
Knowing the stage in the information cycle at which a
particular source was produced can help
researchers determine what a source is best used as evidence
of. For example, let’s consider the story of the
Challenger disaster. When television
viewers watching the launch live saw the shuttle explode, the
story began its course through the information cycle. The
first news reports that people
encountered were in broadcast media, both on television and
radio as events unfolded live. The limited amount of
information that was known was reported as
it was received. That information was soon augmented by
eyewitness accounts and backed by the speculation and
commentary of experts and pundits.
The first complete accounts the events (cause still unknown)
were the stories in the newspaper the next day. Over the next
weeks and months, as the story
developed and the investigation into the disaster focused on
the mechanical and management failures that contributed to the
disaster, the story passed into
weekly magazines, where the topics were explored in more depth
and at some length. Finally we saw the
Challenger disaster work its way into
journals and books, where the event was likely to be placed
within an informed and more fully fleshed-out historical
context.
The information cycle, which one thinks of as “the way
in which newsworthy events are experienced and understood over
time,” is changing, and a lot of this
is due to the possibilities of new media. A defining aspect of
new media is how it has changed audience members’
relationship to information from that of
passive consumers to that of active participants in the
creation of content. This has come about through the
widespread availability of cheap video cameras
and inexpensive video editing software. The type of media that
used to take a large production studio, pressroom, and
distribution network to disseminate
now takes minutes for a single person with an Internet
connection to get out there.
Despite the conspiracy theorists’ claims that media
gatekeepers are constantly withholding vital information from
the public, modern media makes it easier
for inaccurate initial information to spread and endure. Take,
for instance, what happened when an unnamed law enforcement
source leaked a name that was
reportedly that of the Sandy Hook shooter, “Ryan
Lanza.” This was a misidentification, but the
announcement set off a cascade of events that led to the
wrong image being used to identify the shooter on CNN, Fox
News, CBS, and innumerable other outlets within minutes.
According to
Jeff Jarvis, an experienced journalist and
professor who prematurely shared his observations about a
twitter account that later turned out to not be the Sandy Hook
shooter’s:
One of the key skills of the journalist today is not to say what we know, but to say what we don’t know. That’s been the case since 24-hour cable news came
along, where everybody becomes a witness to a story as it unfolds and those of us who were reporters back in the day of pay telephones and notebooks know
that oftentimes by the time our deadline came around, we learned a lot more and we were saved from many ‘instant errors’ because of the time and the
structure of the press. Well, that’s gone now, both because of 24-hour cable news and now because of the Internet, and further gone because anyone can do this. So it’s not just about training journalists when that photo gets retweeted, retweeted and retweeted, it’s the same
difference—it doesn’t matter if a journalist did it.
Furthermore, news, no matter its quality or accuracy, has a
longer lifespan on the Internet than it did two decades ago.
Footage of erroneous reporting can
be captured and distributed widely, and those images retain
their immediacy as they get mixed and remixed into no-budget
YouTube conspiracy videos
alongside better information, often making it difficult to
discern what is good information and what is bad information.
What comes to mind immediately is
the eyewitness testimony of people who had been near the Twin
Towers when they collapsed. The sound bites and interviews of
stunned people covered in gray
dust have been archived and live on in cyberspace. This is not
a bad thing in itself, of course, but without an awareness of
where those clips entered the
information cycle (and the subsequent possibility that that
information will turn out to be if not completely inaccurate,
at least incomplete) someone
viewing those clips now might be led to some rather improbable
conclusions.
Forgetting that reporters, as a rule, try not to report what
is known to be inaccurate information, conspiracy theorists
will point to the early, more
tentative reporting as evidence that something is being swept
under the rug. In reality, a week into the Sandy Hook story,
parallel narratives had
developed in the mainstream media and in the alternative (and
proud of it) media. In the mainstream media, the story is that
of an investigation into the
motivation of Adam Lanza, the individual who was found dead at
the scene with a gun taken from the house of a relative who
had been shot the same day, and
the individual who reportedly was too impatient to wait for a
background check when he tried to legally secure his own
weapon a few weeks ago. Some would
call this converging evidence leading to an increasingly
certain conclusion that Adam Lanza was in fact the one who
pulled the trigger.
In the alternative media, the possibilities and uncertainties
are blossoming unabated, leading to increasingly baroque
explanations and imaginary linkages.
Conspiracy theorists have predictably seized on the earliest,
most confused and jumbled reporting that came out on the
morning of the shooting. Veterans Today contributor
Kevin Barrett
wrote on Dec 17:
Since we know that many if not most “lone nut” massacres are actually false-flag operations, we might as well assume that this one is too. Getting that
message out early, in order to shape public opinion while it is still malleable, should be a top priority of everyone who wants to put the real terrorists
out of business.[…] So the first priority of all truth-seekers must be to “catapult the counter-narrative” as quickly as possible.
This is especially horrifying for those of us who value
conclusions drawn from evidence over conclusion-driven cherry
picking. Barrett follows up with a
widely-circulated list of “inconsistencies” that
in part draws on confused reporting from the first day’s
events, which, though discarded from the media’s
narrative of events as more evidence has accumulated, endures
as the “official story” in the minds of conspiracy
theorists. These include early reports
that the shooter was wearing body armor (he wasn’t),
that the mother of the shooter was connected to the school
(she wasn’t), and the misidentification of
the shooter as Ryan Lanza (the shooter was his brother, Adam).
Confusion and contradicting reports are exactly what
we should expect in the earliest hours of a news story. We
should expect the false reports to
travel far in the media and online. We should expect news
reporters who are interested in the truth to adjust their
stories to conform to the evidence as
new evidence becomes available. What conspiracy theorists
identify as “cover-up” is actually good
journalism, and it is helping audiences understand this
is something that the media should emphasize. Jeff Jarvis
makes the point nicely:
I think that we have a larger job and a bigger challenge which is to make sure that everyone knows that you can’t trust what you learn immediately, and
that if you do choose to spread it, that you have a responsibility to say how you know what you know.