Flurry of Weekend Shootings, Violence Shows Fourth Estate in Disarray

In Australia, Providence, and Los Angeles, the postmodern blame game is already making the who, what, where, when, and why hard to figure

At 6:47 p.m. Sunday, Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT) — 4:47 a.m. Eastern time in the U.S. — police heard reports of shots fired at a “Hanukkah by the Sea” celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney. Two gunmen killed at least 16, including a ten-year-old and a Holocaust survivor, while an additional 38 were injured. Before most Americans were awake, a 43-year-old named Ahmed al Ahmed gained international renown by tackling and disarming one of the attackers despite being “riddled with bullets.”

Within 24 hours, two more were killed and nine injured in a mass shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, while famed director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were murdered in their home, with their son Nick arrested Sunday evening and booked at 5:04 a.m. PT today.

If you were like me and away for the weekend, you likely found digging out even that handful of facts difficult. The world by midday Monday was already plunged into a cacophonous argument about the meaning of this extraordinary flurry of violence, with even the journalistic enterprises spending more time assigning blame than figuring out what happened.

Donald Trump posted that Reiner and his wife died “due to the anger he caused others” through his “massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME”; Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy’s comment on the Providence shooting was to blame Trump for a “deliberate” and “dizzying” campaign to “try to make violence more likely in this country”; Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese somehow already conducted multiple post-Bondi interviews warning of the “rise of the extremist right”; the fact that one of the Providence victims was the Vice President of Brown’s College Republicans of America chapter led Libs of Tik Tok to declare it’s “open season on conservatives now,” while the New Republic was just as premature in declaring this ridiculous; Trump’s FBI and the Providence police force have been conspicuously busy leaking accusations about one another while the manhunt continues after the shooter somehow got away, and on, and on. There are really two Providence manhunts, one in search of the murder suspect (to protect society) and a nearly-as-intense media hunt for answers about the shooter’s race and motivation (to feed bottomless demand for culture-war ammunition).

When the 24-hour news cycle arrived in 1980 via the first repeating CNN broadcasts, journalists worried that covering news events in real time would massively increase the likelihood of reporting mistakes. It turned out to be true and a generation of reporters was trained to be wary of re-reporting first-blush claims, lest we become accomplices in disasters like the Richard Jewell episode or Sandy Hook, where mass killer Adam Lanza’s brother was initially misidentified as the culprit. That kind of thing happens even more in the Internet age (in the last 24 hours, NPR for instance reported that Brown issued emergency system alerts Friday night), but the bigger problem is that news has become so completely a war of subtext that we start arguing the whys before the whos and wheres are even in.

The postmodern news consumer has to build mental Excel sheets, first making lists of claims (Providence shooter is a guy from Wisconsin, Nick Reiner is trans, the Bondi hero was really a Christian), then sorting them into sourced and unsourced categories, and finally waiting to see in which side of the TRUE/BULLSHIT divide to dump the final check mark. The number of checks in the latter column seems to get bigger with each of these horrors. Politicians who had any decency used to only offer condolences and reassurance on days like today, but they’ve all now become so convinced that the power of tragedy can’t be ceded to ideological rivals that every one of them turns death into ad-hoc commercials stumping for legislation, reform, credit, or whatever within minutes after disasters. Blizzards of that always make it hard to see anything concrete, but today it’s particularly bad.

Understanding that it’s become difficult to sort out truth from BS from afar (even though Racket has contributors from Providence), we spent most of today trying to nail down a few things that continue to be confusing in coverage. Walter Kirn and I will try to go through some of those in America This Week at 4:00 p.m., and also discuss other stories that popped up over the weekend. See you in a bit.