Eighteen Shootings

We used to judge information on whether it was true or false. That doesn’t matter anymore. If it helps to advance someone’s political agenda, the truth is irrelevant.

We saw a perfect example this week following the horrific school shooting in Florida. An anti-gun organization tweeted that it was the eighteenth school shooting so far this year. That set off a blizzard of tweets from politicians and activists. Even more disturbing, many major media outlets reported it. Obviously nobody cared whether or not it was true.

Rather than blindly following the herd, the Washington Post decided to investigate. It turned out that most of these incidents were not what we would consider school shootings. They even included a suicide in the parking lot of a school that had closed down.

We need to be skeptical of what the media tells us. All too often their motivation is to attract viewers and/or push a political agenda, not report the news.