Assigning Blame

The blogosphere and on op-ed pages are full of thoughtful commentary on whether or not we should blame to Nidal Hasan for the Fort Hood incident, example Megan McArdle, David Brooks, and John Podhoretz.  Is he crazy, evil, or part of the mass insanity of radical Islamism? Is he Dylan Klebold or is he a suicide bomber?

The traditional Media and Politics textbooks describe three stages to media coverage of crises. The first stage is when everybody rushes to get the initial facts. The reporting tends to be quick, off the cuff, and not always correct. The second stage is when they sort out the facts, ie how many people died and who did it, and they get reactions from important officials. The third stage is the big lessons stage. Reporters and pundits seek to put a framework of meaning around the horror. They frame the incident in terms of gun control or insanity or world politics. Then they make policy recommendations.

The rise of new media has screwed up those neat stages and wrecked havoc with the media textbooks, which haven't yet been amended. Even before the media arrives at the scene of the disaster, eye-witnesses are posting pictures of events from the cell phones on Facebook or twittering events. It's stage 1/2. In order to compete with arm chair pundits, like myself, they run to stage three. There is a rush to find meaning even before the facts are in.

We've got to slow down.

Comments

[Amy P]

All of the above, really (and the facts are coming in very fast). There needs to be a very serious investigation into this guy's entire career path and personnel file. He didn't belong in the Army, and he didn't belong in either medicine or psychiatry, and there should be hell to pay for whoever let him stay. I actually think it's not unlikely that Hasan would have pulled something similar out in the civilian world if he had been discharged, so I'm not sure that the loss of life could have been prevented. What could have been prevented was leaving him with prescription-writing privileges and authority over troubled or vulnerable servicemen.

[MH]

So, I was going to not say anything, but I went and read the NYT. The article they have here is just so different from my thoughts that I'm reminded of why I stopped reading the NYT a couple of weeks after 9/11.

To quote the article "Major Hasan is accused in the attacks last week, but little is known about what might have driven him." So he's a big mystery despite having been investigated for contacts with al Qaeda. But at the same time, suicide figures for soldiers are presented with no comparison figures and no indication that there might be a condition called "Major Depression" or any cause of suicide besides stress. And what combat stress has to do with a mass-shooting by somebody who has never been in combat is completely lost on me.

And then they wonder why the public seems more worried about terrorism, crime, and whatnot than the statistics indicate is warranted. To me it seems clear that the public worries because they assume they are being lied to or getting information from people with baffling world views.

[Amy P]

I'm still waiting to hear about the contents of Hasan's medicine cabinet.

[Doug]

James Fallows asks:

"Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre 'mean'? A decade later, do we 'know' anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison."

[dave.s.]

I think you are right that havoc has been wrought on the media textbooks, and they are like Wile E Coyote, fifty feet past the cliff and just starting to notice that it's a thousand feet down... we have competing providers of meaning. We used to all get our meaning from Maureen Dowd, and before her from Jack Anderson. Now any nutter with a keyboard (that would be ME, thankyouverymuch, or Lucianne, or Markos Moulitsas) can weigh in with views on meaning, and readers will pick and choose.
And it goes on forever: people for whom a particular issue is important will chew on it far past when a Dowd, or Reston, or Broder can possibly keep on it. People are still nipping at Duke's heels over the lacrosse team stripper party and claimed rape, Dan Rather lost his career to blogosphere obsessives. I remember when Butch and Sundance have taken evasive action which would have gotten rid of any ordinary posse, jumped in a river, lost the scent, etc., and they look back and they are still coming. "Who ARE those guys, anyway?!"