When we hear something outrageous and sensational, it’s always a good idea to calm yourself and think rationally. Anger gets clicks gets money, after all, while calm minds and cool hearts rarely get the same. Often times, the more… sensationalist or amoral sites will deliberately try to provoke in order to maximize revenue-like the tabloid magazines of the mid-2000s… many of which are still active and selling their celebrity scandals to this day. Drama sells. With that in mind, let’s take a look at a claim and analyze it’s value.
THE CLAIM:
(https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOgdizJiQ9o/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==)
The immediate claim I have decided, in order to be as up to date as possible, involves the murder of Charlie Kirk. This is a hot button issue, with the balance between “people shouldn’t just be shot” and “Kirk was on record for saying incredibly bigoted things several times throught his life and career, we don’t have to posthumously declare him a saint”. For now, I will be focusing specifically on the messages written on the bullet and the political implications therein.
To illustrate, I will be using the SIFT process to analyze this news and evaluate it’s veracity.
STOP: I am quite aware of the Charlie Kirk situation overall, as it is fairly recent. In addition, this is a news site-that doesn’t make it inherently trustworthy, but it does provide a base.
INVESTIGATE:
I went to investigate the site, analyzing it’s specific features, what sets it apart from other news sites. Groundnews prides itself on something it calls Blindspot, examining how a story is presented from political angles and examining/highlighting how certain sides of a story are ignored due to a lack of coverage. It also provides breakdowns on Left/Center/Right coverage of stories. This shows a dedication to neutrality-which one could consider an agenda of it’s own, but I digress.
FIND:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kirk-shooting-suspect-republican
While I could not find any specific fact checking on the bullet contents or any political beliefs outright stated by current suspect Tyler Robinson (who I will not say outright is or is not the culprit until further evidence is posted), I was able to find a point stating that while Robinson’s family were registered Republicans, Robinson himself did not register a party when he registered to vote.
TRACE:
This image was placed on the Snopes page I have already linked, (with some minor redaction for privacy reasons for Robinson and his family). Government records aren’t easily falsifiable, so I’m inclined to believe this.
So after all of this, we come to a soft conclusion: I did not find direct evidence of the bullet message specifically, but I did find context. And this is still an ongoing development, fairly recent: I can check again in the near future to see if more information comes out.
The point of this is to illustrate that when an event is recent, it can be tricky to find direct confirmation or denial of something. You must always keep checking and chipping away at it until something gives-journalism isn’t always about Big Scoops that Blow A Case Wide Open. Sometimes, it’s about the gradual work that slowly uncovers truths as FOI-Acts and investigations come up. Slow and steady wins the race, so goes the story of the tortoise and the hare.
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