GETTING IT RIGHT: Here Are My Contemporaneous Articles About The Kyle Rittenhouse Shootings, Now Unlocked. From Jesse Singal:

Since the Kyle Rittenhouse trial is underway, I’ve decided to unlock the two contemporaneous posts I did about the shootings — scroll down and you’ll see both of them, one after the other. I wrote about this case twice because it demonstrated, to a disturbing degree, one of my biggest fears about the current media environment: what feels like endlessly accelerating Balkanization. We seem headed toward a point where every major news story generates at least two distinct versions of reality that are summarily adopted as true by many partisans. And the more explosive the story, the more disagreement about the facts.

The Rittenhouse case was a particularly good (or bad) example, because thanks to the number of cameras on-scene, we had a lot of details about what happened fairly quickly. Watching some major media outlets and otherwise trustworthy-seeming figures selectively ignore or tweak those details to fit a preferred narrative worried the hell out of me. It seemed pretty clear, simply from watching the videos and reading the relevant laws and legal analysis, that Rittenhouse at the very least had a decent self-defense case. Not ironclad, but decent. And yet I watched many influential media figures and politicians engage in this weird snowballing act of collective truthiness — they turned Rittenhouse into a monster, into someone who had committed obviously premeditated acts of murder, in a manner that ran dozens of laps ahead of the available evidence. As I argue in the below posts, this sort of distortion can have serious consequences, especially when it collides with the realities of a courtroom.

Read the whole thing.