Making sense of images and video from a chaotic night
It wasn't long after an Antioch 17-year-old shot three people in Kenosha that a photo composite made the rounds on social media.
On the left, the teen holding a military-style rifle stares into the camera, eyes wide and mouth open. On the right, a camouflage-clad woman with a long gun strapped to her chest strides forward in a grainy nighttime image.
"How did Kyle Rittenhouse cross state lines to Wisconsin? His mom, pictured below drove him," the caption said in part, connecting the woman to the deadly night in Kenosha.
But it turned out the photo of the woman was a day old from a protest in Madison, Wisconsin, and the premise unproven. We don't know how Rittenhouse got to Kenosha.
The photo was shared more than 800 times on social media but not, as far as I can tell, by legitimate journalists or news organizations.
Our reporters learned long ago to question and verify what appears on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media. Current political turmoil amped up deliberate attempts to mislead and stir trouble. But it's been going on a long time. In 2013, when tornadoes devastated Washington, Illinois, several accounts on social media contained fake depictions of the storm and at least one of the photos made it onto TV.
Our wariness and need to verify point to one of the truisms of journalism today: The first images that people post after a big news event might not be accurate. It takes time for us to vet them.
That's not to discount bystander videos, which can give unflinching witness to protests, vigilantism, looting and police encounters.
The Kenosha protests and shootings on the night of Aug. 25 and 26 were awash in video, one of which we licensed and published.
Our confidence in the video stemmed from Brendan Gutenschwager's history of such coverage, the lack of breaks or cuts in the video where information could be added or subtracted, and the videographer's affirmation that he shot and had legal rights to the video, said Jeff Knox, the Daily Herald's senior director of visual journalism. Of note, Gutenschwager posts his videos under his own name, not a made-up alias.
The video shows a man firing a number of shots that strike several people at very close range.
In a livestream from a different source from earlier the same day, the same young man introduces himself as "Kyle," according to a New York Times analysis of the videos. Rittenhouse is charged with killing two men, which his lawyers characterize as self defense.
Fact checking and journalism sites like poynter.org offer strategies anyone can use to verify video and images, such as checking whether they're being reused from another time.
Many people scrolling through social media don't take the trouble to use such tools.
But we do.