Shooting stops and media warfare begins

I’ve been reading Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty (2009), the best one-volume history of the very early American republic in the years between the enactment of the Constitution and the end of the War of 1812. In many ways, I notice, this story has the structure of an enormous joke. The American Revolution was wrought by wealthy landowners, many of whom hoped to reproduce the hierarchical, agrarian lifestyle of the English countryside in the New World. These people became the early Federalists: they largely wanted to mimic the world of old Europe, only with themselves on top as rentiers, eschewing labour and trade alike.

But they had sown the wind. The commercial and intellectual forces they set in motion created a new, chaotic, competitive, egalitarian kind of society. And one way this manifested itself was as a media crisis. The Revolution overthrew all established authority, or tended to, and created the conditions for an unfamiliar kind of unregulated, rampant press — an ecosystem full of lies, partisanship, personal abuse, and scurrility.

Even those who made sneaky use of this new system, like Thomas Jefferson, left testimonies to their overall exhaustion and confusion as literate, curious people. You get the impression that being a reader in that time and place, with rumours of wars and tales of corruption zinging around, was hard work.

I don’t think I need to hit you over the head too hard with the point here, do I? Sunday’s mass murder of Muslims at prayer in Quebec City’s suburb of SainteFoy has become the occasion for soul-searching by Canadian politicians and for noble gestures of human brotherhood on the part of the Canadian public. For the news media? It was an unpleasant pratfall — the kind to make you nervous about a broken neck.

If it will not sound too much like an excuse, this was mostly circumstantial. The incident happened on a Sunday night, in a part of urban Canada not overrun with Englishspeaking correspondents. Immediately after the shooting, witnesses spoke to reporters of multiple attackers. In a spree killing with a firearm, witnesses almost always do that — and the police are very often on the lookout for two shooters, or three, or 17, until they are absolutely convinced that the attack involved the overwhelmingly usual lone gunman. This takes time and manpower. Separate accounts and physical evidence gathered by several officers have to be combined into one tentative picture of the crime.

In this case, police on the scene took the frightened witnesses behind a cordon quickly, leaving reporters without further information or the chance of corroboration for hours. The cops let it be known that they had two people in custody, and their names eventually leaked out. Through careless logical inference, more or less everybody forgot to be secondshooter skeptics, and assumed that the two arrestees were the people responsible for the murders.

And one of the men in custody was named “Mohamed,” which interfered, for a brief time, with the natural assumption that the attack on the mosque was a racially or religiously motivated horror. In the end, it turned out to be exactly that: an outburst of violence by a creepy loner who had wallowed in a sewer of Internetforum politics. Mohamed was, we now know, an innocent attendee of the mosque who had been shovelling its walk when the shooting started within, and who ran in fright from armed police when they descended upon the scene.

Up to this point in the story, had anyone deliberately done anything wrong, or even anything that it is really possible to discourage?

The witnesses’ alarmed error about the number of shooters is understandable: it is something that almost literally always happens. The police presumably did not lie about being in search, initially, of multiple suspects. They did not lie, later, when they leaked (or just lost control of) information about having two men under arrest.

But now the seeds of fleeting confusion have fallen into the fertile soil of Internet crap-mongering. On social media there were immediate, unabashed, conflicting total lies circulating about the identities of the “two” perpetrators. Now, before much is known at all of the actual killer, we are seeing deliberately engineered hints at some kind of inexplicable cover-up by the (Muslim-controlled?!) police of Quebec, or by higher authorities — Liberals, reptoids, George Soros clones? Pick your poison!

Those trivial little wobbles in the initial news coverage are being exploited by journalists and commentators who have abandoned respect for facts like “there are always reports of a second shooter” in favour of efficient, direct manipulation of “the narrative.” The actual full-fledged conspiracy theories are being designed as we speak, and soon will be ready for harvest.

We live in a post-revolutionary media environment, and traditional newspapers and broadcasters are like the American Federalists: we are hoping to stay on top as trusted, sensible informers and teachers. I make no claim that this hope is well-founded or appropriate, but either way, the strategy did not end very well for the Federalists. One notices that they are already in irreversible, humiliating retreat at the moment when Wood’s book begins.

There is money in offering an alternative account, any alternative account of anything important or dramatic, to the gullible. Build a suspicious audience of millenarians and ignoramuses, and some of them will keep following you until you can start selling them protein supplements, bulk food for the apocalypse, religious knick-knacks, or penis pills. (Which business line will Rebel Media break into first? It’s only a matter of time!)

In a secular age, like ours or like the late 18th century, it is inevitable that people will attach themselves like limpets to miniature religions. Today they range from gold-bugs to survivalist “preppers” to disturbingly overenthusiastic Harry Potter fans to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop. (My apologies to those readers, and I’m sure there are a few, who are devotees of all four faiths.) Such subcultures are the reliable basis of a bulletproof “news” media model. The horrible part is this: they might be the only such model.