In the days before social media, you would watch the news on TV, and if a story broke that angered you, you could yell at the TV, but that was all you could immediately do. Now, those screams at the TV, in the form of tweets and posts, are aggregated in real time, and quickly affect the coverage. When a scandal breaks, there is no time to take a calm and collected view of events. SOMETHING HAS TO BE DONE NOW.

The nice part of the old “yelling at the TV” model was that you got the catharsis of screaming, but nobody, except maybe your family, saw you. By the time you got to the water cooler at the office the next day, you had more information and time to develop a well-considered reaction to events. Now, public opinion in the moments after news breaks is changing the very nature of coverage in ways that confirm biases more than they inform.

In The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson makes a compelling case that just this kind of cart leading the horse occurred for a recent New York Times story. The Times had profiled a neo-Nazi in the Midwest and focused on how normal he seemed, aside from his atrocious political beliefs. Outrage ensued, as social media insisted that the Grey Lady was normalizing Nazis. By the end of the day, the Times had apologized for running the story.