As the events from Oslo on July 22, 2011 filtered through, TV news producers began to scramble. Many people had been murdered by a gunman, and they needed experts to give expert opinions. Fast. What followed was one of the the most embarrassing examples of uninformed mass punditry in news history. This “must” have been Al Qaeda, most opined. Then, even after Breivik was identified and captured, a number of experts simply refused to believe reality and spun their earlier guesswork. I remember watching CNN’s coverage of Oslo, and not once did an anchor challenge any of these experts. It was an exercise in throwing any half-baked opinion against the wall, hoping against hope that something might stick.
During horrific attacks such as the ones in Oslo and now Paris, there is a certain inevitability to people turning to large, mainstream TV news for information and updates. That’s because TV is still the dominant news source for most citizens: size, trust and pure habit lead us to the places we know. Our personal media history matters. Social media, we are told, while superficially informative and occasionally entertaining, are ultimately dangerous during crises, laden with speculation, half-truths, untruths, hot takes and political points-scoring. However, what I saw when I flicked between BBC, CNN and other large-scale channels as I followed the events in France was little more than those things. In fact, the level of speculation and death-toll pornography on my TV screen more than equaled what I saw on my computer screen.
