News reportage of mass shooting events over the past several years has changed markedly from coverage of such incidents just a few decades ago. Some media critics and researchers have pointed to mass shootings, including those transpiring on January 8, 2011 in Tucson Arizona, July 20, 2012 in Aurora Colorado, December 14, 2012 in Newtown Connecticut, and the recent October 1, 2015 event at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, to suggest that these incidents may have been influenced or even partly contrived with involvement of federal authorities. They reinforce their arguments with an impressive array of conflicting media reports and unrealistic “official” narratives concerning these events as potential evidence of government deception.

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Journalists covering mass shootings twenty or more years ago usually relied predominantly on local police officials and eyewitness accounts to chronicle such events. Information related in such reportage was consistent and accurate in nature, and was quickly related to the reading public. Such reports were produced at a time when news organizations often had only telephone and facsimile to gather content. In light of the above, and in particular the fact that we now live in an internet-fueled “information age,” how can one account for the the almost uniformly poor and sometimes cartoonish reportage of today’s mass shootings? The overall coverage of shootings since at least 2011 has become unreliable and slipshod, with the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre the foremost example of ambiguous, confusing and ultimately irresponsible reportage largely based on state and federal law enforcement officials commenting under the cover of anonymity. Federal agency involvement in homicide and similar crime investigations no doubt tends toward the potential politicization of such events. This is particularly the case as the leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, and similar entities is appointed by the given presidential administration. Such bureaucrats understandably recognize their allegiance to this political power and are readily appease its given agendas. Clear examples of federal interference in local and regional criminal investigations and attendant press censorship may be found in the major political assassinations of the 1960s, in particular the murders of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., where significant public confusion still abounds. More recently, the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City suggests a juncture where federal intervention became increasingly commonplace, ultimately transforming the narrative of that event and how it is called up in popular memory; from a demonstrable government “false flag” attack to a strike against America’s heartland by the enemy within–an unstable, anti-government drifter, comprising the template for the so-called “lone wolf,” a now commonplace term in US police state parlance. Hungry for information to develop stories under deadlines and editorial pressure, journalists are effectively incapable of questioning the pronouncement of official sources. Fearful of alienating powerful relayers of information, they place in abeyance their commonsense discernment of what may or may not be plausible to a situation where their understanding and expertise is limited. This is all the more reason for the concerned citizen to take heed. The plethora of recent mass shootings and array of disorienting news accounts accompanying each should be carefully considered, particularly in light of the more trustworthy and consistent journalism of such tragic events from the 1990s and prior, a journalism far less subject to disinformation and unclouded by prevailing political agendas and goals.