How The Media Botched The Arizona Shooting

How The Media Botched The Arizona Shooting | The New Republic
It's all about the narrative boilerplate.

When disaster strikes, journalists have to write something about it—and write it fast. That means they have to take mental shortcuts, calling up established narratives and laying them out like old wrapping paper for new and more ambiguous facts.

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But sometimes the shortcuts produce a journalistic stampede at the worst possible time. That’s what happened last weekend, when 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner shot six people to death at an Arizona Safeway and gravely wounded many more, including Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The dominant storyline in the press—one that persisted in the face of all the facts—was that right-wing hysteria and lunacy had given rise to Loughner’s atrocity. Only on Wednesday night, when President Obama delivered a speech that effectively told everyone to cut it out, was the stampede halted (one hopes).

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y Monday, The New York Times’ editorial page had kicked into action. It conceded that, sure, Loughner operated “well beyond usual ideological categories,” but, still, it was “legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge.” The Los Angeles Times followed suit. It admitted that, sure, Loughner and “his own demons were primarily to blame,” but it still condemned the “increasingly incendiary and violent rhetoric that characterizes today's political debate,” for which “the right bears the brunt of responsibility.” Meanwhile, dozens of opinion writers were busily adding related but equally ethereal musings to the heap. Writing in the Guardian, blogger Jessica Valenti blamed a “country that sees masculinity—especially violent masculinity—as the ideal.”

There is of course one advantage to all such lines of argument, if argument is the word for it. They are entirely faith-based, which makes them pretty much irrefutable. But faith-based punditry works in more than one direction.

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So why did the press go so far astray this week? How did many fine, otherwise fair-minded journalists allow their judgment to become so clouded? Let’s venture briefly—and hopefully not too speculatively, lest I be accused of double standards—into the realm of cognition. Organizational theorists such as Karl E. Weick, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan Business School, have researched how we react to unexpected events. In his 1995 book Sensemaking in Organizations, Weick notes that we humans automatically categorize what we encounter, ushering messy new complexities into tidier established categories (“myths, metaphors, platitudes, fables, epics and paradigms,” to be precise). When something bad and inexplicable takes us by surprise, our brains reach for the handiest existing narratives, and accuracy falls by the wayside in favor of simple plausibility. “The stories are templates,” writes Weick. “They are products of previous efforts at sensemaking. They explain. And they energize.”

In essence, reporters under pressure to write about a dramatic story right now fit a blizzard of facts (and putative facts) into the narratives they have at the top of their stack. And the narratives are almost entirely leftist, with few if any colleagues offering a conservative take by way of counterpoint.