The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
How misinformation about Dulos spread so fast.
The news Tuesday that Fotis Dulos had died spread like wildfire.
TV news helicopters live-streaming from the air above his Farmington home shared images of a body on the ground, while sources close to Dulos confirmed for media outlets around the world that he had, in fact, died.
Which, as everyone learned a few minutes later, was not true.
“That is a reflection of how the news cycle operates in terms of information shifting in nanoseconds,” said Rich Hanley, a journalism professor at Quinnipiac University. “It’s representative of just how unstable news is. One official source may say something with only partial information.”
Dulos, charged in the death of his wife, Jennifer Dulos, was on house arrest but was due back in court later that day. He faced the possibility of returning to prison.
He was found in medical distress after an apparent suicide attempt, just before noon on Tuesday.
By 12:30 p.m., news organizations, including Hearst Connecticut Media, were reporting that verified sources close to Dulos stated he had died, while adding police had not officially confirmed the news.
Half an hour later, Dulos’ attorney, Norm Pattis, told Hearst Connecticut Media that Dulos had a pulse.
“These are things only an official pronouncement can address,” Hanley said, though he doesn’t believe news sources did wrong by reporting Dulos’ death. “There was no choice, you can’t get beat by another news organization on a story of this magnitude.”
“It’s bizarre,” he said. “But bizarre is now normal.”
It wasn’t just the press. Pattis said it was his understanding that police notified families for Fotis and Jennifer Dulos about his client’s death. The Dulos children, who live with their grandmother, were then reportedly pulled from school.
That, too, was not wrong, according to Hanley.
Brian Foley, executive aide to James Rovella, the commissioner of the state Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection that oversees the state police, did not respond to a request for comment about the families being notified.
Gary McNamara, who was chief of police in Fairfield and is now executive director of public safety and government affairs at Sacred Heart University, said “generally, death notifications are taken very seriously.”
In this case, it’s an “atmosphere that’s dynamic,” he said. “Within moments, there’s photos of officers working on Mr. Dulos in his driveway.”
It’s not that the news cycle has increased in speed, Hanley said. It’s how many people are involved.
“The new thing here is just the capacity of anybody to just insert information into a Twitter or a Facebook news feed,” he said. “Stories take on a certain existence beyond any traditional news gathering experience. The technology has outpaced our capacity to understand it.”
McNamara agrees. He said for police and the media, it’s a “constant battle among all of us, between getting information out quickly and getting information out accurately.”
What’s changed, he said, is how difficult is it to control the message.
“People have cellphones, they can text,” McNamara said. “We are always chasing the message, because there are a lot of messengers. Technology has provided all of us the capability of being our own messengers.”
When he spoke with Hearst Connecticut Media for this story, Hanley was preparing to teach a class on disinformation. He was working, he said, to “try and make sense of” of how news about Dulos’ death spread so quickly, when it was not accurate.
“It starts with one thing, then it becomes many other things,” Hanley said. “For all we know, this story will change.”
McNamara said police departments are probably doing the same thing.
“What people are left with now, is trying to unravel what notification was made and when and how that information got out,” he said.