Vox - The medias carelessness is helping ISIS use Las Vegas to its advantage

While I generally agree with this article, I also think it ignores how the current White House has shown a willingness to adopt and spread stories in the social media that helps it push its agenda. You can imagine Kelley strongly insisting that there is no evidence to support early social media reports that the shooter was either a left-wing fan of Rachel Maddow or a member of ISIS even though Trump probably wanted to believe and forward along such reports on his twitter feed.

I bet that in the weeks to come, Trump will start circulating links to alt-right outlets that suggest that this was a left-wing conspiracy or that it was an attack by ISIS or North Korea, while disclaiming any independent knowledge as to whether such stories are correct. In other words, during the election, Trump was happy to pass along propaganda pushed by foreign governments, so why stop now?

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/10/2/16403958/las-vegas-shooting-isis-claim-responsibility

Shortly after news of the Las Vegas shooting broke on Sunday evening, ISIS’s official Amaq News Agency claimed responsibility for the attack. In the subsequent hours, most experts have concluded that the claim was almost certainly bunk. The shooter, Stephen Paddock, so far has not been found to have any established links to ISIS, nor is there any evidence that he shared their worldview. The FBI has publicly stated that Paddock had no connection to international terrorism, a rare step at this early stage of the investigation.

Yet when I searched Google News at around 3 pm Monday, several of the top articles had headlines that clearly treated ISIS’s claim seriously. And these weren’t from fringe outlets; we’re talking Fox News and Newsweek.

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Media coverage that promotes this line, despite the lack of evidence, helps ISIS’s strategy to succeed. Research online media show that people rarely read past the headlines and first few paragraphs. Stories like this one from Newsweek’s Jack Moore, which doesn’t raise doubts about the claim of responsibility in Las Vegas until the seventh paragraph, helps spread the terrorist group’s spurious claim.

It’s also incredibly hard to correct false information once it has spread into various media ecosystems, especially when that false information is politically convenient. For right-wing outlets especially, making Las Vegas about terrorism rather than gun violence puts them in much more comfortable ideological territory. Hence why some of the more unscrupulous ones, like Gateway Pundit and Infowars, are still amplifying ISIS’s claim of responsibility.