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In the hours after Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist and media star, was fatally shot on Thursday, news outlets raced to satisfy a sudden, staggering demand for information. Little was known about his killer. So it was notable when, around ten the following morning, the Wall Street Journal updated its liveblog to report that “an early bulletin circulated widely among law enforcement officials” found the ammunition had been engraved “with expressions of ‘transgender and anti-fascist ideology.’” The Journal’s post provided some detail about the substance of the bulletin (“an older-model .30 caliber hunting rifle was discovered in the woods near the scene”) but did not describe the inscriptions or provide political context about the “ideology” phrase. The story quickly spread on social media and got picked up by The Guardian, The Telegraph, and the Daily Beast, among others. Soon, the Trans Journalists Association weighed in, urging caution and noting that “‘transgender ideology’ is a term coined for and used in anti-trans political messaging to falsely equate identity with politics, which is a way to frame transgender identity as a political choice rather than an innate identity.”
This was one of a number of shaky reports that emerged in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. Major broadcasters filled airtime by sharing reporting alongside speculation. On MSNBC, Matthew Dowd, a pundit, suggested that the assailant might have been a “supporter shooting their gun off in celebration.” (Dowd was later fired for his comments on television that day, including a remark that Kirk’s “hateful” speech may have precipitated the shooting.) On CNN, John Miller, a chief law enforcement analyst, argued that the shooter was likely someone with a degree of expertise. (“This wasn’t an amateur,” he said.) On Fox, a retired FBI agent told Jesse Watters that the attack had the signs of a “professional hit.” The notion that the shooter must have been a trained marksman reached its apotheosis late on the night of the killing, when John Solomon, the pot-stirring off-again on-again Fox contributor, told Sean Hannity that he was hearing of some nebulous connection to “foreign intelligence.” The next night, Hannity mentioned that he too had “a source in the intel community” who suggested “there might be a foreign component to it.”
By that point, on X, Steven Crowder, the right-wing podcaster-provocateur, was going viral: he’d posted about the bulletin at 8:35am on Friday—ahead of when the Journal covered it. Shortly after one in the afternoon, the New York Times had more: the bulletin was a “preliminary and unverified report” from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. “In fast-moving investigations,” per the Times, “such status reports are not made public because they often contain a mixture of accurate and inaccurate information.” Social media buzzed with rumor and discontent.
Soon, the Journal amended its reporting, changing the headline of its post from “Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved with Transgender, Antifascist Ideology: Sources” to “Early Bulletin Said Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved with Transgender, Antifascist Ideology; Some Sources Urge Caution.” No formal correction was made. What appeared on the liveblog “wasn’t an error,” Elena Cherney, a senior editor for standards and ethics at the Journal, told me, but rather an “update to an existing story.” The new material added context, she said: “As the day developed and as our reporting developed, we talked to other law enforcement officials.”
But the next day, when Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, gave a press conference, the Journal added an editor’s note to its post, including a word of warning about interpreting the bulletin (“may not accurately reflect the messages on the ammunition”) and reporting that the engravings included the phrase “Hey fascist!” along with “other messages and symbols”—none bearing any “transgender references.” The editor’s note, Cherney said, aimed to address “a social media outcry” and be “even more transparent.” When asked about the Journal’s use of the phrase “transgender ideology,” she replied, “We reported on the wording that was included in the bulletin provided by law enforcement officials. We cited the bulletin as the source.”
On Friday, a suspect was identified: Tyler Robinson, a twenty-two-year-old from Utah. Donald Trump and others from the MAGAsphere claimed, absent visible evidence, that Kirk was a victim of “radical left violence”; those comments aired on Fox, and soon morphed into calls to “go after” left-leaning organizations. Some other networks devoted significant airtime to explaining the online subculture of “groypers”—people to the right of MAGA who had expressed contempt for Kirk, but with whom no connection has been established with Robinson. Over the weekend, journalists fumbled in search of a motive: the messages on the shell casings appeared to be less manifesto than trolling; one, “Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao,” the chorus of a Mussolini-era anti-fascist anthem, could have had a double meaning, since the song was popularized by Money Heist, a Netflix series, and appropriated by the gaming community. On Monday, the Washington Post reported that Robinson had posted on Discord, the online platform: “Hey guys, I have bad news for you all,” he wrote. “It was me at UVU yesterday. im sorry for all of this.” The State of Utah’s Fourth District Court has since charged Robinson with aggravated murder. Prosecutors will seek the death penalty.
The pace of criminal investigation does not always lend itself to twenty-four-hour news coverage. Nevertheless, as TV networks cycled through updates, rumor, and commentary, other outlets continued updating liveblogs—competing, too, with conjecture and misinformation on social media. The desire to serve audiences the latest scoop seemed, at times, to collide with the limitations of vetting. This has come up before. “A number of news outlets got the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act wrong,” Kathleen Culver, the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said, recalling shifting winds in 2012. “It caused a lot of reflection and, I think, a very important pullback.”
Liveblogging has since popularly reemerged “in part as an attempt to gain audience,” Culver told me. “But speed and demand should not change any of the calculations or the reasoning that we go through as journalists. In fact, I would argue it means we should pay more attention. We should take even greater care and bring even more ethical reasoning.” Even so, “when you have the president of the United States blaming the radical left for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, with absolutely no suspect at hand at the moment that he says it—what is a news organization to do? Whether it’s a liveblog, a six o’clock news story an hour later, or a print edition that lands on someone’s doorstep the following morning,” she said. “Are they to not call it?”
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