Bruce Benidt
Jon Austin
tcarideo
Ellen Mrja
Mike Keliher
Joe Loveland
The first reports from Fort Hood are chaotic but are coalescing around a couple of truly horrific numbers – 12 dead, 31 injured in a shooting on the U.S.’s largest military installation. Now comes word that the one of three possible shooters is Army Major Malik Nadal Hassan, age 39 or 40.
There is so many things we don’t know about this situation, but there’s enough true weirdness in the little bit that’s already been put out to make an old crisis guy wary of jumping to any conclusions on who might have done what in this situation. I can almost guarantee that most of what we think we know now is incorrect, incomplete or miscontextualized.
As the media is once again demonstrating, the rush to judgment, the need to speculate and hypothesize in order to fill air time is irresistable. They are helped in this by a legion of talking head “experts,” “consultants” and “witnesses.” We haven’t seen much of the latter, but that’s because the base is on lock-down and you’d have to be truly crazy reporter to try to breach that perimeter right now.
There’s lots of ways this incident could have ramifications far beyond the terrible toll already paid.
Say a prayer if you’re so inclined.
UPDATE: True to form, it turns out facts as basic as the whether the alleged shooter is alive or dead turn out to be wrong. Amazing.
- Austin
Filed under: Communications, Crisis | Tagged: Fort Hood, III Corps, Malik Nadal Hassan
I can’t help but think that if those “experts” were real experts — you know, without the quotation marks — more of them would be smart enough to not say much. Some are great at putting a questioning anchor in his or her place, but so many are too quick to speculate.
And it seems the stranger or more extreme the situation — say, the balloon boy “story” — the more likely people are to speculate.
I’ll withhold judgment and speculation about Nidal Malik Hasan in the same way you did the following day of the I-35 bridge collapse.