Ambushed in Brooklyn

[Suvorov]

Let me see if I can organize my position on this issue. Books have been written about this, so I'll try to keep focused.

I appreciate the well thought out reply. The problem is when a "Narrative" such as we have seen lately leads to increased tension and even further blood loss.

So what (if anything) is to be done? Do you think one news organization is better than the other? I was drinking from the fountain of the Economist for a while, but even there I began to see a large amount of group think reflected in their reporting. I'm just a simple man who would like to be informed, it seems that the only way to do it is to ponder over hundreds of different reports, find the similarities and the differences, compare them to my experience and judgement and then make a decision - but who has time for that? I can honestly see why so many people prefer to drink the Kool Aid or remain in the dark?

[Terence]

So what (if anything) is to be done?

Great question. I don't know. If you look too hard at the word 'informed,' and think about it for too long, eventually you'll hear words like "epistemology" and "semiotics." None of that shit will help you. In fact, a blast of post-modernist static will just make you crazier.

I don't think there are any general news outlets that don't fall prey to the issues I listed above. CNN, ABCNews.com, MSNBC (duh)... they are all racing to beat eachother and fill a bottomless news hole with whatever can draw the most eyeballs.

I'd say that in general you can have 80% confidence in CNN et al for numbers and dates. If you want to know on what date something happened, or how many tons it weighed, or how many people were reported injured, killed, present, absent, etc etc. Just don't rely on first reports. The dust has to settle.

You should be very skeptical as you move on to timelines, (ie. did the officer shoot before or after he identified himself as a police officer) or interpretations of events/laws, or anything where the reporter draws a conclusion based on the facts or quotes. They may easily have been misled or not known what questions to ask.

So in terms of being generally informed about local and world events by disinterested fact-gathering reporters, it's probably impossible. Nobody wants to pay or wait for that kind of reporting.

Really good investigators can sometimes make it work as documentary film makers...

I'd say, pick the 2 or three things that you really care about, find the authors, bloggers, forums, specialty sites where those events are discussed, and trust CNN.com etc as little as possible.

As I read back over this, I'm struck by how damning an indictment of the 'news business' this is. I was a reporter, the son of a reporter, and I spent years believing that I was informing my readers. I quit to make websites, and felt that I was doing more for the public by helping them buy diapers, than writing news.

[MDS]

Thanks for the insight, Terence! Do you have a sense of whether the "fourth estate" was ever much different? I imagine the slowness of media transmission allowed for more in-depth reporting, but in terms of bleeds/leads and tropes/Narrative as you describe above - has that ever been very different?

[Terence]

Another great question.

There's something in our brains that seems to like stories. Beginning, middles, endings. We naturally organize and structure things, and look for patterns. I don't mean that your 12-year old wants to clean his room, but that we all seem to try to make sense of the world in a variety of ways -- look at what came before, predicting what will happen next and why. Depending on our experiences or our biases, we range from adequate to awful at this, reporters included.

What am I saying? Maybe The Narrative exists because it satisfies -- at some level -- the way we want to see the world. Being able to spin theories and make quick predictions is a pretty good survival trait from an evolutionary perspective. Or maybe its because we are mostly stupid and lazy.

So I think the Narrative has always been there, but now we can measure exactly what story is popular and even how far down the page people are scrolling, or when they change the channel, or skip commercials. And that means we know what people like and the News Business now can't pretend that it does not.

Until 5 or 10 years ago, nobody had much of a clue how people were reacting to content in the moment. In the 70s, I remember being a Nielsen ratings family and filling out a little booklet which we mailed in. So back then, I bet you people still turned to the gossip columns and sports sections, first but you could pretend that the hard news was pulling in readers/viewers.

When I was at Time, the Managing Editor found out the newsstand sales figures for the Princess Diana Funeral issue and practically shed tears-- how was he going to surpass that? And when they ran that stupid cover on Do Angels Exist, they did boffo numbers.

So to answer your question, I think that the Narrative has always been with us in one form or another, but now if you run CNN.com you can get detailed reports that let it shape your coverage if you let it. And they let it.

[Tamara]

I imagine the slowness of media transmission allowed for more in-depth reporting, but in terms of bleeds/leads and tropes/Narrative as you describe above - has that ever been very different?

Remember the Maine?

(It was too perfect a response to not use it. )

[Terence]

"You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war."-- William Randolph Hearst

[Bigguy]

I still work for a newspaper. I'm in IT now, but I started as a graphic artist. I did editorial cartoons, illustrations, and graphs. For at least one paper, back in the 80s I can testify that we worked very hard to get the story right, and worked equally hard to report it objectively. It was routine, in those days to pull a story, because it didn't pan out. One of those criteria was 3 independent sources. That requirement caused us to miss a few "scoops."
Up until very recently, I still had faith in elements of the media. Sadly, I've been forced to acknowledge that many (I'm being charitable here) "news" articles are agenda driven. As a tech guy, I'm no longer on the inside of the news gathering process. But it doesn't look to me like we adhere to the same criteria or objectivity that we once did. And the reporters today don't seem have been trained to those old standards.
Frankly, I'm really having to reign myself in. I still work here and don't want to jeopardize my job, but suffice it to say that we've run 2 articles in the past week I was disappointed with. I did express my concern, but was pretty well blown off. The editors contend that there were no factual errors in the articles, which is true. But they did have a definite tone in the way the points were played. And in my opinion, the tone was horrendously wrong in both. And in both cases, a little more work on the reporters part, and an objective approach to the writing would have produced vastly different articles.

[runcible]

Yes, he wasn't killed by the law but pulled the trigger when the other officers got to him. This is a fairly standard pattern. While the terminology is loose, shooting yourself when challenged is part of the package. There is a chance if they shoot you - you might not die. Thus, pull the trigger yourself.

Call me contrarian, but woudn't this better describe the pattern of an active shooter, vice someone attempting to "suicide-by-cop?"

Those attempting to outsource their own ending don't seem to desire any sort of breaking contact, as I understand it; whether they are actively engaging LEOs or otherwise demanding attention for action.

Those we call active shooters have a pretty strong trend towards avoidance of discomfort, when exposed to an opposing force (LE). Some fight it out until the end, but quite a few immediately suicide or surrender, once LE is recognized as arriving.

[Glenn E. Meyer]

It's ill defined and the concepts are fuzzy. There are active shooters that have other goals than suicide. If one wanted to kill targets in a manner that gives you a reasonable chance of getting away, this isn't the way to do. The DC snipers were effective killers with an economic motivation. Death wasn't their end state.

I don't think avoidance of discomfort is the motivation in the case of the suicides in a gun fight with cops in manner clearly unsurvivable or self-inflicted. The overarching goal is to kill and then die. Is there a real difference between killing yourself when the cops arrrive or a suicide charge into many guns? Probably not. But I grant you the terminology is loose.

The Brooklyn shooter threatened to kill himself in front of his ex-girl friend and had threatened before. That was his end state. If he wanted to kill police, he could have been (God Forbid) more effective over the long term.

[Tamara]

I would like to point out in regards to the "Black Muslim" angle advanced earlier, that despite this 4th quarter rally, "Libertarian-ish Cracker Gun Nuts" still have a 3-2 lead on the cowardly back-shooting of LEOs scoreboard for 2014, if I've been filling my scorecard out correctly.