Jannelouisa

Two and half hours after a bomb exploded at the Norwegian Prime Minister’s office, and a man had gone on a shooting spree at a camp for Labor Party youth, two facts were known — 17 people were killed and, as for the prime suspect:

The lead of Foreign Policy’s article was entitled ‘Norway’s 9/11?’

But this was immediately followed with ‘expert’ Kristian Harpviken asserting with total confidence that there was only one real possible explanation: al-Qaeda.

Reading the many #oslo newstweets written under the presumption of an Al Qaeda link, I was puzzled, so I asked:

But the Al Qaeda narrative was too compelling. And then this nine-day old article from the Atlantic was circulated. It was as if this confirmed the theory.

The arguments in the article were repeated by many experts and commentators I came across, although at this point there were still only those two facts that had been established: 17 dead and a white, blond Norwegian man arrested. Nevertheless, the al-Qaeda story was flourishing.

And then a new “fact” — one that provided ‘proof’! — revealed itself, and the journalists and editors jumped on it. After all, here was exactly what they needed to legitimize the narrative they had already put forward.

Will McCants, a blogger on www.jihadica.com and CNA analyst at Johns Hopkins Faculty, was the source of this new fact. He had been monitoring Shmukh, a forum for supporters of al-Qaeda, where McCants claimed that a man named Abu Sulayman al-Nasir had taken responsibility for the attack, on behalf of a group that calls itself ‘Helpers of Global Jihad.’

Even though the original thread had been deleted and the only source was McCant´s copy-pasted quote (in Arabic), the “fact” was soon picked up by news agencies and immediately went viral.

From McCants published the quote on his blog and until NYT ran with the “fact”, individual skeptical Twitters had been asking questions and when Ansar al Jihad retracked the post, they saw the story debunked.

That made NYT and BBCBreaking modify the “fact” with a caveat.

NYT continued to refer to the (largely debunked) Jihadi connection in their main story, which led other news outlet to do the same. Tweeters responded by repeating that the claim had been discredited.

At this point the mainstream media was presenting it as a given that Norway was facing its own 9/11. Prime Minister Stoltenberg’s first speech after the attacks fed into this narrative:

The Telegraph, 21.39 Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg says Norway will “never stop standing up for our values”

I have a message to the person who attacked us and the people who are
behind it: You’re not going to destroy us. You’re not destroying our
democracy and our work for a better world. We’re a small country but a very
proud country. No one can bomb us to be quiet. No one can shoot us to be
quiet no one can ever scare us from being Norway.”

The hype around the al-Qaeda link was so intense that islamophobic hate speech was proliferating on blogs and user fora and, according to Philidelphia-based Norwegian journalist Lene Johansen, also in the streets of Oslo:

Many tweeters of Arab descent were upset, though far from shocked:

Finally, the only source that could possibly provide credible information about the assassin’s motive appeared, the police. Norwegian media incorporated the new information in their subsequent reports:

Now, the BBC News’s Security correspondent, Gordon Corera, also came forward to suggest that the Jihadi assumption had been false:

“During the day, after an initial focus on an al-Qaeda link, the possibility of domestic extremism increasingly came into focus. The choice of targets - government buildings and a political youth rally - suggested a possible political agenda rather than the mass casualty approach typically employed by al-Qaeda.”

Yet, some news outlets stubbornly clung to the debunked al-Qaeda link:

When the assassin’s identity was ultimately revealed, the motivation behind these atrocious attacks became clear:

Yesterday was a tragic day in Norway. Unfortunately, the experts and media’s eagerness to fit the events into pre-conceived narratives about global terrorism perpetrated by Muslim extremists meant that those murdered and wounded by the killer’s bombs and bullets were not the only victims. Their rash conclusions, based on shaky evidence, incited anti-Muslim sentiment unnecessarily - and they wasted our time with non-accurate information.

Certainly, these ‘experts’ spoke too soon. Perhaps even more alarming, however, was the media’s willingness to trust their conclusions, almost blindly.

Social media has revolutionized the time frame in which information is disseminated, so mainstream media, overeager to keep the edge, are going with information that goes viral, even before it is confirmed.

The Texas massacre hoax was a lesson, now #oslo is another.