Singal says the moment he noticed it was the Covington student encounter in Washington, D.C. For Sexton it was the Trayvon Martin case in 2012. He also cites the Michael Brown shooting and a few other examples (There are plenty to choose from, he notes).
He writes:
For me this kind of breach with reality really became clear much earlier, during the Trayvon Martin case in 2012. In that case it was clear who had done the shooting from the start but almost every other detail seemed to exist apart from the facts.
Remember when NBC News edited the 911 call to make it sound as if Zimmerman had been racially profiling Martin? Two NBC producers were eventually fired over that error. Remember when ABC News claimed there were no injuries to the back of Zimmerman’s head and then retracted that after an enhanced video showed they’d been wrong?
Remember when Rachel Jeantel told a reporter she believed Martin threw the first punch in the confrontation that led to his death? (Most people never heard about that.)
Remember when Ta-Nehisi Coates claimed he could hear a racial slur in the audio of the same call? Coates later wrote a major story for the Atlantic claiming that all of the pushback (to correct reported errors) was because President Obama was black.
The point is there were a lot of things the media got badly wrong about that story, some of which were corrected, but a lot of people still insist on believing the first version.
The same was true of the shooting of Michael Brown. Once again, you had a lot of instant myths crop up, some of which (“hands up, don’t shoot”) are still with us.
I still remember the piece in which Vox’s Ezra Klein explained the moment in Officer Darren Wilson’s story when “every BS detector in me went off .” He was referring to Wilson’s claim that Mike Brown paused during his assault on Wilson to hand the bag of stolen cigarillos to his friend Dorian Johnson.
Just one problem with his BS detectors. The story matched what Dorian Johnson said happened. Rather than admit he was wrong and issue a correction to the story, Klein published a second story the same day in which (many paragraphs later) he admits “Johnson does semi-corroborate a key moment in Wilson’s account.”
Again, as with the Covington kids, most news outlets did eventually admit error in the initial coverage but it was too late. A lot of people preferred the initial stories about Mike Brown’s death and didn’t want to hear the revised (factual) versions.
Sexton goes on to give a few more examples, but an important consequence of all this is that when people refuse to allow themselves to be swayed by facts, progress, in this case social progress, grinds to a halt and shifts into reverse.
We become balkanized into a hodge-podge of warring groups that no longer have any common ground upon which to stand to talk with each other. Instead it's women vs. men, blacks vs. whites, liberals vs. conservatives, atheists vs. Christians, and who prevails is not whoever has the best ideas and can marshall the most evidence but who can shout the loudest and who can intimidate their foes most effectively.
Rather than forming conclusions based on objective facts, many people form their conclusions based on their subjective emotions. For many in our postmodern age beliefs are justified by desires, not by reason. If they want something to be true it is true regardless what the objective evidence may indicate. If a biological male wants to be a female then he is a female notwithstanding his genetics and physiology. If progressives want it to be true that blacks are being "hunted" by white police officers then it is true regardless of what the statistics show.
If the facts support their beliefs, fine, but if they don't support them, so much the worse for the facts. Indeed, to cite objective facts, to rely on reason, is scorned as patriarchal or an expression of "white privilege," as if non-whites can't be expected to be rational.
This is not only irrational, it's atavistic. It's a throwback to a more primitive and tribal stage in our civilization's development. When facts no longer matter then all that matters is forcing others, by whatever means necessary, to conform to one's vision and desires, and that mindset has led always to the guillotine, the firing squad, the gulag and mass graves.