well here we are again. watching the story of another mass shooting unfold.
at 11am pacific time today, three people attacked a holiday party in a conference room at a community center in san bernadino, california, leaving 17 wounded and 14 dead. now, eight hours later, we know little more about what happened than we did immediately after the occurrence.
has this mere trickle of new information put a damper on news reporting? oh, no no no. don't be silly. there are anchors and reporters and analysts all booked for the day, all hoping for the scoop, all eagerly anticipating a chance to give their opinion.
the coverage is constant and live and granular. every tiny tidbit of information is reported and examined and analyzed and re-reported and re-examined and re-analyzed and rinse and repeat until the next tiny tidbit drops into the center ring, to be spotlighted in the attention of the nation's most brilliant spin-masters, who begin immediately to speculate a structure around the tidbit, twirling it in the web of their worldview. they will all say they aren't sure, will admit the speculations are speculatory, will all use all the right vocabulary about hypothesis and supposition so as not to mislead us into false faith in their winding web, while simultaneously yearning for us to make that very leap.
press conferences (uh... pressers) are hyped like rocket launches, complete with anticipatory countdowns and live video of an empty podium waiting like a lonely manger for the wee baby jesus*, because pressers are where the Officials deliver Real True Facts and as good as the tidbits are, Real True Facts from Officials are many many orders of magnitude better. whereas the heads can twirl a worldview web from the tidbits, they can Claim Knowledge with the Real True Facts. worldviews are ephemeral. Knowledge Claims are power.
thing is, a major story such as the aforementioned act of violence is complex. simple stories aren't big news and complex stories are... uh... complex. you know -- large things made of many smaller, interconnected things? complex. the complexity which factors into the producers' deeming the story worthy of scrutiny, that very complexity naturally contributes in the story's unfolding slowly.
the coverage is constant, and the facts are sparse, thus the result: everyone says the same things, watches the same scraps of video, talks to the same eye witnesses and experts. over and over, tearing into this great onion of a story and coming back with a mere scrap and subjecting that scrap to thorough examination.
the extreme inspection of minutiae elevates the minutiae. the scarcity of fact de-elevates the fact. the worldview webs, being more prominent, distract from the Knowledge Claims.
in all the constant coverage, ironically, the story itself is lost.
*rocket and jesus in one sentence. boom.`
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