The Brian Sicknick Case Shows How the Media Make Their Own Reality

N ot a single journalist at America’s paper of record asked anyone with first-hand knowledge whether the late Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer, was bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher before they reported it. They took the word of “law enforcement officials.”

The initial Times report about Officer Sicknick’s death, from January 8, was paved over with caveats on February 12. In between that time, we got the big feature story that was premised on the original lie: “He Dreamed of Being a Police Officer, Then Was Killed by a Pro-Trump Mob.” That article, too, now has a note appended to the top: “New information has emerged.”

And what is that “new information”? The D.C. medical examiner now says that Sicknick showed no signs of internal or external injury, and that he died after suffering two strokes. People are free to speculate that the stress of the Capitol riot may have contributed to his strokes. That seems plausible. But why did this take months to figure out? Why did people keep repeating that Sicknick had been bludgeoned to death for so long, despite the fact that there was enough reporting in the first two days after the riots to cast doubts on the story?

Normal people have started to use the word “narrative” the way only journalists and advertising executives used to use it. “The media is pushing a narrative,” they say. “If it doesn’t fit the narrative, it will be ignored.”

This should trouble people in the news business. And it should probably trouble everyone else, too.

Being an avid consumer of news is like walking through the dream sequences in Christopher Nolan’s Inception: You look around, and the chairs that people sit on and the bridges they are walking across all appear solid. That’s wood and wicker, and that there is concrete. You’re experiencing reality itself, at least for a time, and you must move through it treating those objects as real, as everyone else is. But then, those chairs and bridges are folded upward into the sky, or begin exploding. Reality falls apart, a giant flood of water washing it all away like the biblical flood. And then a new dream sequence is invented.

We’ve had this happen often lately. Allegations that Russian intelligence agents had offered the Taliban bounties on our soldiers in Afghanistan were confirmed by half a dozen outlets, but by the time it became clear that they were untrue, the story itself had faded away. A few years ago, there was a supposed epidemic of sexual assault on campus, one that justified the weird Title IX letter and university kangaroo courts. But the story of Columbia University’s “mattress girl” and Rolling Stone’s giant exposé of an alleged rape at the University of Virginia both fell apart on further examination.

Many times, news stories are constructed just from a little accumulated hearsay. Instead of reporting that an event happened, newspapers report a subject’s claims that something happened, but do so in a way that makes the event itself seem like fact. Outrage and social-justice entrepreneurs have used this feature of the news business to produce hundreds of hoax political crimes. Those stories, too, explode and disappear in the flood of corrections eventually, but only after readers have internalized the atmosphere of crisis they created.

What’s insidious about this is that the news business itself increasingly resembles the QAnon phenomenon. The Q accounts on social media use basically the same techniques of de-contextualizing and re-contextualizing events within a pre-determined narrative, then moving on to the next arc before the previous one completely falls apart. The Capitol rioters were following the twists and turns of the Q accounts on Instagram and other message boards, the accounts hyped up Sidney Powell and Lin Wood that promoted the theory that Mike Pence could just refuse to count the phony electoral votes and, voilà, Trump would remain president. And once Biden was inaugurated, that narrative receded.

What’s astonishing in retrospect about the Q phenomenon is how much it resembled the mainstream media’s fascination with the Steele dossier and the drama of Robert Mueller’s investigation. In both cases, there was a supposed secret truth that would be revealed in an epic conclusion when the hero of the story laid a trap for the villains to walk into. In both cases, when the great, hoped-for narrative resolution didn’t materialize, a new narrative took over.

The sheer amount of propaganda spread in coverage of the world around us eventually diminishes one’s ability to believe in the authority of anything. To take one example, I’m still convinced that public-health experts really believed the studies they cited in March 2020, which speculated that laymen who wore masks would have a higher likelihood of catching COVID because they would engage in riskier behavior and touch their faces more. By the end of that month, the experts and their boosters in the media had all settled on a story that this had been a noble lie designed to protect precious resources for front-line workers. I’m guessing the self-exculpating “noble lie” will be what makes the history books.

In the meantime, we must live in a world where a man dies from being bludgeoned by a fire extinguisher, but then the fire extinguisher evaporates into thin air and it turns out he died of a stroke. We must live in a world where scenes of mayhem, the sounds of gunfire, and the flames of a burning building on television are helpfully labeled “mostly peaceful” to prevent us from believing our own eyes.